Posts Tagged ‘The 3/50 Project’

After the flurry and credit card chaos of giant retail shopping sprees on Black Friday, consider shopping small.

Saturday, November 30 is a day to support local and smaller businesses on Small Business Saturday. Founded by American Express in 2010, this day has come to be celebrated each year on the Saturday following Thanksgiving. When you decide to shop small and keep your money locally, you help save your local economy.

According to the 3/50 Project, for every $100 that is spent locally in independent stores, $68 returns to the community through payroll, taxes, and other expenditures. When you spend $100 at a retail chain, only $43 stays within the community. When you buy online, nothing stays in your hometown.

If you have an American Express card, you can sign up on the Small Business Saturday web site to get a $10 statement credit when you make a purchase of $10 or more at a qualifying small business on November 30. Register your American Express Card HERE.

For more information, visit the Small Business Saturday web site HERE.

And LIKE Small Business Saturday on Facebook HERE.

Please consider shopping at all the local businesses in Plain City this coming Saturday. Here in the drugstore, we’ll be giving a ten percent discount on all purchases of $15 or more, excluding prescription medications (which we cannot discount due to rules with insurance companies). But you can still buy gift items and over-the-counter necessities.

And if you do buy gift items, we’ll have someone in the store from 10 am to noon wrapping presents for a donation to Black and Orange Cat Foundation. Bring as many boxes as you want us to wrap and we’ll provide the paper, bows, tape, and gift wrapping expertise for a donation that will help support spay and neuter efforts for stray and homeless cats in the Plain City area.

That brings us to Giving Tuesday. After days of crazy shopping (remember Cyber Monday comes shortly after Black Friday!), Tuesday, December 3 is a day to give back to local charitable organizations who need your help to continue doing good within your community. A group that is near and dear to our heart is, of course, Black and Orange Cat Foundation.

You can make a donation on Giving Tuesday to help Black and Orange with their spay and neuter efforts by visiting their Giving Tuesday donation page HERE.

For more information on Giving Tuesday, go HERE.

To LIKE Giving Tuesday on Facebook, go HERE.

While Joe and I were at the NCPA (National Community Pharmacists Association) annual meeting in Philadelphia, we sat in on a marketing program and one of the things the speaker introduced us to was “The 3/50 Project.”

The 3/50 Project asks which local or independent stores in your community would you MISS if they suddenly disappeared?

They also state that “for every $100 spent in locally owned independent stores, $68 returns to the community through taxes, payroll, and other expenditures. If you spend that in a national chain, only $43 stays here. Spend it online and nothing comes home.”

The 3/50 Project asks you to choose three local businesses and spend $50 in those stores to save your local economy.

Joe and I are just starting a shop local program in the pharmacy, so be on the look out for more information on that. We will have signs, stickers, and bag stuffers explaining why we think it is important to shop locally. Additionally, we have asked our employees to “shop locally,” and we’ve put our money into encouraging them to do that. Joe has officially made the two dollar bill the local currency for Plain City. We gave each of our staff twenty-five two dollar bills with the only limit on their use being that they have to be spent in local businesses. As the weeks go by, we’re going to see if other Plain City shop owners notice an influx of two dollar bills in their cash registers. We hope this will show people just how much their money fuels our local economy.

At Plain City Druggist, we completely agree with the idea of The 3/50 Project and shopping locally. In the next month, Joe and I, as well as our staff, will be doing our best to spend $50 (in two dollar bills) in local businesses that we know we cannot live without. We’d ask you to consider doing the same. We also hope we are one of those businesses you would hate to lose.