Support local businesses

Locally owned businesses play a central role in healthy communities. Small business ownership has been a pathway to the middle class and continues to be a crucial tool for expanding prosperity and community self-determination. When a consumer supports his local business owners, he enjoys benefits he can’t possibly get from shopping at national chains. Here are some reasons to support your local entrepreneurs. 

• Improves family health.
• Locally owned businesses contribute much to local causes.
• You will know the people behind the product.
• Preserves uniqueness of your community.
• Better customer service. 
• More personalized service. Small business owners will bend over backwards for every customer, because every single customer matters when they are small.
• Locally owned retailers recycle a much larger share of their revenue (~52%) back into the local economy than the chain retailers (~14%), enriching the whole community. Similarly, the local restaurants re-circulate an average of 79% of their revenue locally, compared to 30% for the chain eateries.
• Locally owned businesses create more local jobs and provide better wages and benefits than chains do.
• Entrepreneurship fuels economic innovation and prosperity, and serves as a means for families to move out of low-wage jobs and into the middle class.
• Local stores require little infrastructure and make more efficient use of public services than the big stores and shopping malls.
• Local stores help to sustain vibrant, compact, walkable town centers and in turn reduce sprawl, automobile use, habitat loss, and air and water pollution.
• A marketplace with several small businesses is the best way to ensure innovation and low prices over the long-term.
• A multitude of small businesses, each selecting products based, not on a national sales plan, but on their own interests and the needs of their local customers, guarantees a much broader range of product choices.
• Shopping local is more important than people think. Even the value of your home goes up.
• Local small businesses outperformed their peers in income growth, employment growth, lower poverty rates and lower levels of income inequality. 
• Communities with a larger share of local businesses have more social capital, stronger social ties, higher levels of civic engagement, and better success solving problems.
• More local businesses ensures lesser usage of automobiles by as much as 26%.

43 Reasons You Should Support Small And Independent Businesses

Enacting policies that strengthen small businesses and expand opportunities for local entrepreneurs is one of the most effective ways of reducing inequality and expanding the middle class. In India, government finds it difficult collect taxes from large number of small businesses, especially in informal sector, and tendency has shifted to promoting larger businesses for better tax realization and in their quest for taxes collection simply forgot their fundamental responsibility of reducing rich-poor gap.  Modi and Jaitley are guilty of  inflicting deadly blows to 'informal sector' which provides livelihood to >60% of the people with their 'hare brained demonetization' and 'haughtily designed & implemented GST' which almost pushed the entire Indian economy to the brink of collapse.

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