Money Spent Shopping Locally will Still be at Work after the Holiday Season
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
On a cold Saturday at the end of November, the Anderson County Farmers Market pavilion looks like something out of a snow globe that forgot the snow. Strings of holiday lights abound; tables sag under candles, pound cakes, boiled peanuts, leather journals, and Clemson-orange beanies. Cars nose in and out of the crowded lot at the corner of Tribble Street and Murray Avenue, and for a few hours, the holiday economy of Anderson tilts away from warehouse roofs and distant fulfillment centers and back toward people whose names you can learn in a single transaction.
Economists have a term for what happens when money lingers in a place instead of evaporating on contact: the local multiplier. Studies of independent businesses suggest that, on average, just over half of every dollar spent at a locally owned shop—about 50 to 53 cents—stays in the surrounding community, reappearing as paychecks, rent, orders from nearby suppliers, and donations to Little League teams and school auctions. By contrast, when that same dollar goes to a national chain, or vanishes into an online cart, only around 13 to 15 cents remain nearby; the rest is whisked away to far-off headquarters, distribution hubs, and shareholders you will never meet.
One widely cited analysis puts the difference in simpler terms: for every dollar you spend at a local business, roughly 60 to 70 cents stays in and around your town, while only about 30 to 40 cents of a chain-store dollar does the same. Multiply that by the hundreds of dollars an average household spends in the holiday season—gifts, decorations, meals, the obligatory new string of lights—and the gap becomes the difference between a community that can fund its own future and one forever waiting on the next outside investment.
In Anderson County, the places where those “sticky” dollars land are not abstractions; they have front doors and regulars. Locally owned stores and restaurants, downtown Anderson’s holiday boutiques and bakery, our local bookshop McDowell’s Emporium, and coffee shops that tuck themselves into old brick storefronts—sit alongside long-running institutions in Belton, Honea Path, Pendleton, and Williamston, where shopkeepers still know which size sweatshirt you bought last year.
The county’s own “shop local” campaigns, promoted by Anderson County officials and local outlets, lean on this familiarity, reminding residents that every purchase at a homegrown business helps pay for someone’s kid’s piano lessons, someone’s new hire, someone’s second location in a building that would otherwise sit dark.
Even the less romantic sectors tell a similar story. Economic-development reports note that when firms choose Anderson for warehouses, manufacturing plants, or service hubs, each job sets off ripples: more contracts for local trades, more lunches at nearby diners, more property and sales tax revenue for schools and roads. Shopping locally during the holidays taps into the same mechanism on a smaller, more personal scale—turning a mug or a pair of earrings into another shift on the schedule, another seasonal hire who might, if the numbers work, become permanent in January.
The benefits of a local purchase are rarely printed on the receipt. When a dollar recirculates, it does so quietly: the baker at the market buys her flour from a distributor in the Upstate instead of out of state; the yoga studio contracts a local graphic designer; the boutique owner sponsors a youth baseball team whose families, in turn, stop by after games. One study in small towns found that a hundred dollars spent at local independents generated about $45 of additional local spending as businesses and employees re-spent their earnings nearby, compared to only about $14 when the same money went to a big-box store.
Scaled up, that disparity affects everything from the number of storefronts with lights on to the strength of the tax base that pays for festivals, parks, and public safety. When holiday dollars bypass local cash registers, the leak shows up months later—in the nonprofit that quietly drops a program, the restaurant that can’t quite justify keeping its doors open on weeknights, the young entrepreneur who chooses Greenville or Charlotte over Anderson because the numbers look kinder.
For residents, the choice is rarely framed that starkly. It is framed in convenience—two-day shipping, free returns, the ability to shop in slippers—or in price, as if the cheapest option on the screen were always the most rational. But the research suggests that a modest shift in behavior—redirecting even a slice of holiday spending toward local independents—can have outsized effects, magnifying each dollar two to four times over as it moves from hand to hand in the community.
So, one way to think about December in Anderson County is as a month-long referendum on where that magnification happens. A book from the local shop instead of an online giant, a gift card from a local spa, a wreath from a church bazaar, tickets to a local theater production: each is, in its own small way, a vote for more light in familiar windows in February. The holidays will end, as they always do, in a tangle of ribbons and recycled boxes; the question is how much of the money behind them will still be at work, quietly, in Anderson when the lights come down.
