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Shop Local

Updated: Nov 19, 2025

We are just over a week away from Black Friday and the “official” start of the holiday shopping season/orgy of consumerism.   Our primary Economic Call to Action remains:  rethink your holiday gift-purchasing plans.


Not “cancel Christmas.”  Not “month-long economic blackout.”  Not “General Strike.”  Not yet, anyway. 


But this next month is an excellent opportunity to reconsider our own personal complicity in an economy where so many of the Major Players are actively collaborating with a tyrannical regime – not just throwing billions of dollars in tributes and extortion money to Trump, but pre-emptively adopting Project 2025’s racist, xenophobic, misogynistic policies that hurt their own employees and customers.


You know who we’re talking about.  Target.  Amazon.  Wal-Mart.  Home Depot. Hobby Lobby.


And you know the answer:  Shop Local. 


And, add to that:  Let people know you’re doing it.  


If you use social media, copy and paste one of the images below, and share them on your socials.  Or use a search engine to find one of hundreds of other similar images that you like better.



 

The national Indivisible organization has launched a campaign and website along these lines. For more information, visit https://indivisible.org/campaign/we-aint-buying-it



 


Or better yet, while you are searching, find a Shop Local image that you like on a t-shirt or a hoodie, and give a dozen of those away AS your holiday gifts.  But don’t order them online.  Make note of the vendor, go to a local small business, and let a store in your neighborhood order them for you.


And tell people why.  For most people, “Shop Local” is perceived as a “positive” message, while terms like “boycott” can still be scary or off-putting.   Shopping local keeps money in your community’s economy.  Buying from national brands sends the profits out of state.  (You don’t have to add “to rapacious billionaires” if you don’t want to.  But if you do want to tell friends that you are smashing down one of the pillars of the oligarchy, that’s okay, too!)


If we want to get really in-your-face about it, we can save our receipts.  Take photos of them.  Redact the personal information.  And then as Christmas approaches, share them with the managers of the big box stores, to let them know how many hundreds, or millions, of dollars they didn’t make from us this year.


Resources

Saying “Shop Local” is all well and good, but where do you start?


Readers of this blog don’t need us to remind them of areas like Broad Ripple, Mass Ave, or Fountain Square; or the charming main streets in Zionsville or Franklin.  But maybe you haven’t visited some of those areas in a few years.  Next weekend, go to one of those instead of the mall.


Talk to the owners of the local stores you already patronize.  Odds are, they are well attuned to the Shop Local movement, and practice it themselves.  Ask the owner of the bookstore where they personally shop for their gifts, their shoes, their jewelry, their household goods. 


How do you know which businesses are locally owned?


Traditionally, the answer was to check out the local Chamber of Commerce.  And that is still not a bad place to start, at least in terms of identifying which businesses are indeed locally-owned.  Of course, not all locally-owned businesses are going to align with Indivisible’s progressive values.  Many will be owned by MAGA enthusiasts; and to be sure, there are such local businesses that we avoid as studiously as we avoid Hobby Lobby. 


The Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce is not particularly useful for this purpose; that organization is made up of many national brands, but their directory is searchable by industry.  (https://portal.indychamber.com/#/public/member-directory)


Carmel also has a useful search-by-industry directory:  https://members.carmelchamber.org/list/


Chambers of commerce in other surrounding counties are much more likely to have membership lists comprised of locally-owned businesses.  From there, it is up to you to do some more research, or maybe simply visit, see if the merchandise or signage gives any clue, or simply talk to the staff.


Using a search engine to find local chambers of commerce will often lead you to the US Chamber of Commerce website, which is searchable by location and has a surprisingly large number of local businesses in some areas. 


As a general rule (although certainly not exclusively), women- and minority-owned businesses are more likely to be aligned politically with progressive values.  Next week, we will continue to explore more of the smaller or more specialized membership directories in the area.


Last week we talked about the GoodsUniteUs and ShopWhereYouVote apps, which are good for identifying the political leanings of national brands. So far, we haven’t found a comparable resource for researching local businesses.  (Maybe you want to help us create one?  Email us at info@indivisiblecentralindiana.org.)


For those of you who use Facebook, there are numerous Facebook pages and groups that promote local liberal businesses, and they are worth joining.  These include:


A word of caution about these social media groups.  They are excellent resources for businesses to advertise their liberal leanings to prospective liberal customers; and they are good resources for people asking for suggestions (“I need a new furnace.  Which local HVAC company should I call?”). But much of the information shared there is crowd-sourced and not vetted.   Indivisible Central Indiana does not recommend participating in boycotts of particular local businesses based on negative reviews on these sites.


We are still in the early stages of learning how to flex our economic muscle.  For now, keep thinking about how to redirect your holiday shopping plans.  Go Forth and Shop Local!!!

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