Auntie Kate The Resale Expert

With all the whinging about the world being taken over by the mega-corporations, it’s sometimes hard to remember that small business, too, is alive and well. Families, friends, and neighbors celebrate each others’ successes (and sometimes, mourn their failures), help one another across the miles and across the ether, and provide for their customers a warmth that acres of linoleum and miles of fluorescent tubing set into asphalt paving where cow pastures used to be can never hope to achieve.

So, even though Small Business Week is typically celebrated in April, according to the government agency SBA, we think that every week should be “Support your Local Shops Week”. Celebrate your local businesses. Get off the 6-lane road to Mall Blandness and onto Main Street. Take a look at those shops that keep your downtown alive, and spurn those giant businesses that care more for their stock market performance than your family’s comfort and safety. It’s good for the heart to buy a dress or a dresser from someone whose business and home is in your town, whose kids go to school with your kids and who plants petunias outside the shop just “because they look pretty.” It’s soul-crushing to buy at a corporation owned by a foreign subsidiary of an international triumvirate which uses sub-standard everything for the sake of the bottom line. That bottom line, you know, which never stays to improve where you live.

Don’t drown in the Sea of Sameness. Celebrate your home town…even if you just moved there. After all, no one lives on those death-trap highways that look the same, whether they are in San Antonio, St. Augustine or St. Louis.

Be a citizen of your town. Shop local. It’s better for you, your town, your neighbors and your environment. The soul-warming aspects … and International Resale Day…are a mere side benefit!

The ribbon-cutting photo is of Oncore for your Home, one of Too Good to be Threw‘s best buds, and a sponsor of HowToConsign.com