NOV 2012 – Shop Redlands First….It Pays!!!
In an effort to encourage customers to Shop Redlands First through the year the Chamber has successfully administered a campaign that has been both fun and fruitful for all the businesses in Redlands especially Chamber members.
Each month the Chamber has offered a prize valued at $100 or more. Shoppers have been encouraged to bring original receipts from Redlands businesses showing purchases of $25 or more to the Chamber office, the date on the receipt reflecting the date of the month of the drawing. The receipts are signed by the Chamber staff and exchanged for a ticket… the customer fills out address and phone number and the ticket is placed in a basket to be a part of the month end drawing. If the receipt is from a Chamber member the customer gets two tickets (Chamber members can be found on the Chamber’s website).
At the end of each month a drawing takes place for the $100 prize and the winner is announced on the Chamber’s website, in an email blast and in the Redlands Quarterly Magazine Chamber page as well as the local press. Shoppers have flocked to the Chamber office each month with receipts vying for gift cards, cash cards, gas cards and more.
President of the Chamber Paul Barich, Barich & Associates Insurance, who originally brought the idea to the organization, said, “It’s a great program that hopefully makes people stop and think about shopping locally first. It’s important to keep the dollars local, to support our local businesses and to champion the small business owners of Redlands.”
Why shop local?
1. Protect Local Character and Prosperity
Redlands is unlike any other city in the world. By choosing to support locally owned businesses, you help maintain Redlands’ diversity and distinctive flavor.
2. Community Well-Being
Locally owned businesses build strong neighborhoods by sustaining communities, linking neighbors, and by contributing more to local causes.
3. Local Decision Making
Local ownership means that important decisions are made locally by people who live in the community and who will feel the impacts of those decisions.
4. Keeping Dollars in the Local Economy
Your dollars spent in locally-owned businesses have three times the impact on your community. When shopping locally, you simultaneously create jobs, fund more city services through sales tax, invest in neighborhood improvement and promote community development.
5. Job and Wages
Locally owned businesses create jobs.
6. Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship fuels America’s economic innovation and prosperity, and serves as a key means for families to move out of low-wage jobs and into the middle class.
7. Public Benefits and Costs
Local stores in town centers require comparatively little infrastructure and make more efficient use of public services.8. Environmental Sustainability
Local stores help to sustain vibrant, compact, walkable town centers-which in turn are essential to reducing sprawl, automobile use, and air pollution.
9. Competition
A marketplace of tens of thousands of small businesses is the best way to ensure innovation and low prices over the long-term.
10. Product Diversity
A multitude of small businesses, each selecting products based, not on a national sales plan, but on their own interests and the needs of their local customers, guarantees a much broader range of product choices.