Speaking of localism...

after I wrote the last post I read the lead "story" in Friday's Ahwatukee Republic section of the AZ Republic. Colleen Sparks' "Why leave Ahwatukee?" read like a PR piece written by a local chamber of commerce or homeowners association, and in fact much of it consisted of quotes from a member of the Foothills HOA board.

The reason I cite this article is that on the surface it discussed some of the reasons we live in, as Colleen put it, "the world's largest cul-de-sac". Ahwatukee Foothills may be the poster child for Phoenix's Urban Village model: technically part of the City of Phoenix, but in practice nearly a self-contained municipality. Having retail stores and services here within our political and geographic boundaries is an essential requirement for this sort of semi-isolation, and Sparks' article focuses on the fact that we have enough of those to keep shoppers and homeowners relatively happy.

But what she only barely touches in the piece is that while we have almost no lack of shopping and services here, it seems most of it is in the form of chains and big boxes rather than locally-owned businesses. She did mention a few local businesses, but the front page photo says it all: the HOA board member, standing outside a Blockbuster with a Starbucks cup in his hand.

I don't want to suggest that Sparks is not a good reporter. In fact, she generally does a good job covering our quasi-burb for the Republic, and the end of the piece covers a lot of what's genuinely great about our piece of the city. Furthermore, her blogging conveys a real sense of place - see her recent blog entry on the closing of the Coffee Plantation store at 48th & Warner. My point is that to be a place in itself, Ahwatukee needs to move beyond the big box strip mall model and grow more locally-owned businesses.

I don't expect our nominally local news supplement to be much of a booster behind this, as I suspect there isn't a whole lot of prospective advertising revenue from the likes of, oh, say, Ahwatukee Pet Sitting. But we have to start pushing Ahwatukee's economy to the next level, and we can do a lot better than patting ourselves on the back for having our own supermarkets.

Navigating the flash floods of localism

One thing I'm trying to do while growing this business is to buy goods and services from other local businesses whenever possible. It's pretty well established that money spent with locally-based businesses puts more money into local economies than money spent at national chains.

I've preached Localism for over fifteen years, sometimes to a fault, Here in Ahwatukee it can be hard to practice, especially since a lot of the would-be local businesses seem to be outside our urban village limits. Maybe that's just the relatively short time I've lived here, but as I drive through our commercial areas I see mostly Big Boxes.

In my line of work part of keeping local is a no-brainer. I work with veterinarians by neccessity, and with the exception of a certain national chain that will remain nameless here, vets tend to be locals. I'm not going to exclude a certain veterinary practice in Elliot Park from my service area just because it's part of that national chain, but I'm focusing on the neighborhood-based clinics.

I didn't do so well on this front yesterday: I had flyers to print, and took advantage of KinkEx's online printing services instead of taking my flyers over to a neighborhood copy shop. The truth is, it was a lot more convenient and efficient - I uploaded the files, paid by credit card, and picked them up when I was in the area. The nature of this particular service will set a high barrier to entry for smaller, independent copy centers - at least for a while.

To make up for it, I'm taking my Applied Laziness experiment over to Laloo's this morning and pump some local dollars into a local croissant and coffee.