March 21st, 2008 - Buying locally–pet stores
I’ve been thinking a lot about buying locally, that is from locally or regionally owned businesses. Part of that has been ongoing, part of it most recently because I’m reading Big Box Swindle, which is so scary I had to stop reading it in the evening because I thought I’d have trouble reading it. (I’ll talk about the book more when I’ve read it. I don’t think I’ve finished more than a couple chapters, if that much. It’s about how big box retailers are taking over America, and what that means to us as people and economies. It’s stuff I’ve known, but hadn’t seen so well laid out in one place and with data and research to back it up.)
This week, I ran out of hairball treats for the cats. We used to always buy these at Petco or Target. Starting this week, we buy them at the local pet store. We used to buy dog and cat food there, too, but all the animals are on special food that we buy through out vet. They didn’t carry the typical treats–the ones just like other cat treats except with hairball oil. They only have PetroMalt, which comes in a tube. Hmmmm…a bit a messier, but okay, I’ll try it since I want to support this store.
The cats loved it this morning. And I realized that the packaging is better than the typical treats. First, the tube is metal–although I can’t recycle it, I believe that some day our landfills will be dug up for metal resources so I fell better about metal than plastic. And secondly, the outer package is cardboard, which goes straight to recycling. Typical treats come in plastic pouches which aren’t good for anything. Plus, the cats can eat through the plastic and cause a mess. (Pi did it once before and ate almost an entire bag of treats overnight.)
Next, I have to start trying the downtown hardware store as a first stop instead of a last. This one is harder for me to bother with, because it’s much smaller so I’ve not had luck in the past (except that in other circumstances, it was the only place that had what we wanted). And our other option is Menard’s, which while a chain is a regional chain with headquarters about than 50 miles away. So buying from them isn’t like buying from Lowe’s (which recently got tons of money to build a store, right next door to Menard’s which has been here forever. I bet Menard’s didn’t get tax breaks to move to town decades ago.)
March 21st, 2008 at 2:28 pm EDT
you may want to try having them order stuff for you if you don’t mind waiting a bit.