coffee business strategies

“One of the wonderful things about our town is the opportunity we have to support local business and help keep financial resources in the area instead of distant corporate headquarters”.

Quality of Life

Inland Empire business people make an enormous and positive contribution to the quality of life in our community. Local businesses create good jobs, and they boost the local tax base, which in turn improves our schools, our parks, and the quality of life in our town. Most importantly, local businesses are invested in our community. If you look behind the scenes at any civic activity that contributes to the common well being of the community, you are likely to find a local business person (i.e. Uncle Howie’s Pizza, GFE Coffee, The Farm, Crate-Tivity etc,) giving their time, product and often their money, to the common good. Local business people are the unsung heroes of our community. They are the leaders, the ambitious, hard working people who have ideas and act on them.

Local Business Dollars Stay Local

Small and locally owned businesses are an important part of an economy that provide for everyone. By keeping money local, we can take charge of our economy. Any time a dollar is spent, it generates a dollar’s worth of economic activity and employment. If the same dollar is spent several times, then it generates several dollars worth of employment, behaving as if it were several dollars, not just one. Every dollar has the potential to generate benefits several times its face value.

If you give your dollars to a chain store, then that money leaves our community and we benefit from it very little. If you spend your money at a locally owned business, then that money is more likely to be spent again and again in the local economy. In a recent economic analysis conducted in Austin, Texas. They found that locally owned businesses generate three times the economic impact of chain retailers on equal sales. They attributed the difference to the following reasons:

• Local Merchants spend greater percentage of their money on local labor.
• Local Merchants keep their profits in the local economy

In terms of money, they found that for every $100 spent at a national retailer only $13 stayed in the local economy. If that same $100 was spent at a locally owned business more than $45 stayed in the local economy. Simply put, that dollar you spend with a local merchant goes a whole lot farther in the local economy than money spent on the chain stores. Why should you care? Because it’s the local merchant you call when you need a sponsor for your child’s sports team. It’s the local merchant that you call when you need a donation for your fundraiser.
As a local business person, I can not begin to tell you how frustrating it is to get even our “locally owned” grocery stores, restaurants or gaming halls to even consider buying product from me, or how many church’s I freely give product & gift baskets too, but when they build a mega-church, they solicit a national coffee chain to open a kiosk. What happened to supporting the local guy?

Stop feeding the lions and start feeding your neighbors instead.

Take just two days every week and do the following:

• I commit to support local independent business owners.
• I commit to spend my dollars in my neighbor’s shops, even if it’s a little more expensive! (That way they can have money to spend in our businesses!)
• I commit to NOT BUY anything from a chain store or mass-discount online retailer unless there are no local alternatives.
• I commit to be part of a movement to support small, independent, locally-owned businesses. That’s how to keep us from poverty, whether economic, ethical, or political.

What we are doing is increasing the power local business owners have, supporting our local economies, and decreasing the power huge corporations. Do it consistently and it will make a difference.

Cliff B. Young - Redlands
Founder of GFE Coffee House & Inland Empire Coffee
Cliff@IECOFFEE.com