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January 30, 2012

Our Opinion: Buying locally is right

We are happy to report this week that buying locally made products appears to be on the upswing in the Cooperstown area. We have long been a proponent of shopping locally. It stimulates the local economy, returns more sales tax to the county and is more environmentally sound. Buying locally made or grown products takes it one step further.

“They say that all politics are local, right? Well, all economies are local too. It comes down to a pretty simple choice of where you want your money to go. If you want to send it overseas, you can do that, and if you want to keep your money here, you can do that too,” said Brenda Berstler, the owner of Savor New York, a Main Street store and Internet company. She said 99 percent of the items in her store are made in America and a majority are made in New York.

Shopping locally and buying local products is one way for consumers to do something about the economic woes facing this nation. We should be keeping as much of our money as possible right here in our local economy.

We need to slow the flow of money to corporations whose products are made overseas where labor is cheap, working conditions are often bad and environmental regulations are lax.

Granted, it is sometimes difficult to find alternatives to the mass-marketed, made-in-China products that fill the shelves of many stores, but there are alternatives.

And when shopping, price should not be the only consideration — product quality and safety can’t be overlooked. In addition to items carried by stores like Savor New York, locally grown or raised food is an excellent place to begin or expand your efforts to buy from local sources. The Cooperstown Farmers’ Market is a great place to find them.

We aren’t too trusting of produce grown overseas and marked “organic.” We would have to wonder what the standards are and who is certifying compliance with those standards.

We hope the trend toward buying more local products grows. If it does, more locally produced products will come to the marketplace.

The next time you’re shopping, ask yourself if you want to continue to support the kind of wages, working conditions and environmental degradation that often go hand-in-hand with the mass-produced consumer goods made overseas or if you want to be a bigger part of building a strong, vibrant local economy.

We hope you make the right choice.

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