Locally made. Locally owned. Is it really?

[TheMadMonk]

Had this thought walking home tonight. Don't know if it's been considered before.

I was thinking about the difficulty I had earlier in the day purchasing a packet of tobacco. Within 100 metres of my front gate, there is both a pub/hotel/saloon and a kebab shop/milkbar. The one has a cigarette machine, the other averqages approximately three dozen packets ranged across perhaps six popular brands of tailor made cigarettes. Neither carries rolling tobacco of any variety. Not even the rough as guts prison dark.

Please anti-smoking campaigners, leave your particular predjudice at the door. I mention tobacco, only as the trigger product for this musing.

All of us (of a certain age) have watched as the availability of many common, high demand (and indeed essential) products has been increasingly consolidated into increasingly larger centralised complexes. Essentially the last bastion of the corner store, is take-away plus a few ultra-high demand products (convenience: eg. carbonated drinks, crisps; occasional: Whitegoods, etc and essential: eg. milk, sugar bread) with a little leeway proportional to the distance from one of the centres of consolidation in the case of essentials and concentraton (eg. town centre vs. mall) for occasionals.

O.K. hopefully that's set the stage, vis a vis the arena withing which we as consumers are constrained to opperate.


My question concerns the players within the arena.

Many of us are careful to choose our purchases with an eye towards claims of local manufacture and local ownership of a product manufacturer. We even give some thought to whether the ownership of a local manufacturer is local or foreign.

But, just how sure can we be that we're really doing what we think we're doing, when we read the labels? There are all sorts of logo programs to indicate local manufature or ownership, some with quite stringent rules and definitions of what actually contitutes local manufature or ownership.

But how much consideration is given, within these rules, or when we personally make our choice, as to the way ownership may nest?

Can a subsidiary to a foreign owned corporation that is incorporated within a particular country, claim to be locally owned within that same country?

Do any of the "Local Ownership Programs" specifically prohibit this kind of finessing of reality?

Do WE think about who owns/controls the company which owns/controls the locally incorporated company, localy marketing, or manufacturing a particular product?



Sudden brainfart.

My understanding is that all of these "consume local" programs rely on a lexical rather than mathematical description.

Ultimately, it seems to me, that one single meta-criterion matters:
How much of a given product's asking price, avoidably passes beyond the borders of a country/region/town's ecconomic influence?

How close to home does your money stay?

Is it possible to devise a ranking system, that encompasses both the practicality of production (ie. a town of 500 can not resonably be expected to wholely produce a "local automobile") AND the ultimate destination of our hard earned dollar? And further, do so in such a way, that value can't be subtracted (as opposed to the concept of value added) through artificial edifices of ownership?

Finally if such a system cam be practically devised, would it be reasonable to give that system the force of law and enact penalties for false claims under that system?

[iamahaingttta]

1. I just love your accent!

I think about this stuff quite a bit.

On a similar note, I work for a computer retailer in Manhattan.
We are a fairly small shop, and the owners of the company all work there.
The bank where they deposit their money, and where the payroll checks come from, is still a fairly small bank, not (yet) eaten up by one of the multi-national banks. (although they are merging with other small banks - so it's inevitable)

Everyday, we get customers who ask this question: "Why should I buy from you and pay sales tax, rather than buy online and save some money?"

We always start with the obvious - we support these products and repair them and you'll save time and money in the long run, because it WILL break and we'll have records of your purchases here... etc. We know what we are doing and you'll never get the kind of service from a website that we can provide.

But it's often the more intangible stuff that gets them. If you buy from us, the money stays in the local economy. You're paying the salaries of all these people you see here. The owners of the company live in the neighborhood, not in China or California or somewhere else. There aren't institutional stockholders somewhere getting a cut. Your money is deposited in that bank right there across the street, where it is loaned to people in the neighborhood to make improvements to the neighborhood. And sales tax? Come on, don't you think the cops and the firemen in this city deserve to get paid? Nobody likes taxes, but they are there for a reason. Let's not go back to the days where you had to purchase a badge to put on your house for the firemen to put out the fire!

Granted, we are selling computers that are manufactured elsewhere, marketed by a company across the country, so a lot of the money is going somewhere else. But the profits stay local. I endure a certain amount of bullshit working where I work because I feel strongly about living this way. I could go somewhere else and make a lot more money, but I don't want to because this is important. A lot of us who work there feel this way!

Hope this makes sense...

[TheMadMonk]

2. Exactly.

"Granted, we are selling computers that are manufactured elsewhere, marketed by a company across the country, so a lot of the money is going somewhere else. But the profits stay local. I endure a certain amount of bullshit working where I work because I feel strongly about living this way. I could go somewhere else and make a lot more money, but I don't want to because this is important. A lot of us who work there feel this way!"

No matter what one does, you're allways going to lose something on the swings. The trick is to minimise those loses. And of course to also make enough gains on the roundabout so as to at least cover one's losses.

[A Simple Game]

3. "Hope this makes sense..."

Yes it does, and good for you.