<p>I actively avoid chain restaurants and spend quite a lot in locally owned restaurants here in Portland. I buy a lot of my food at a regional chain store and some of it at Whole Foods, which is national. My pet food stores are small and local and carry brands that are not available at Petco or Petsmart. I mail order some of my pet food from a small store in Nebraska but am trying to persuade my local store to carry that brand. (One of my dogs has IBD and allergies and that particular food is great for her, for some reason.)</p>
<p>I have very mixed feelings about “buy local”. All brick-and-mortar stores have local employees; whether the profits stay local or go somewhere else is more relevant. That said, we own several businesses that employ local, profits stay local, but we take orders and ship orders all over the country. I’d hate for our customers–most of whom are not local–to go to their local store instead of shopping with us! We are a small business; we pride ourselves on our services; we treat our employees exceptionally well (most employers in our market areas do not provide health insurance, for example; we do).</p>
<p>I guess I’d come down on the side of changing the question: whereever you shop, ask yourself these questions: are the employees paid a living wage in their community? do they get health insurance and reasonable sick time off? what are the profits used for? do they grow the business or are they used to pay outrageous CEO salaries? what are the employee-to-management pay ratios?</p>
<p>When we lived in Seattle, Costco, Amazon, and Starbucks were all locally-owned chains; I had no problem shopping there, because I knew people who worked for all three companies. Now that I’m in Portland, I continue to shop at all three, but I prefer, as much as possible, to get my coffee at the coffeeshop on the corner and buy used books from Powell’s (whenever feasible)–but I still buy bulk TP at Costco.</p>