Arrival of big-box store in nearby city prompts a 'shop local' editorial in a country weekly

With Black Friday turning into Brown Thursday and some big stores already offering holiday discounts, it's also the season for "shop local" editorials in rural newspapers. But sometimes such editorials run out of season, when a big-box store comes to a nearby town and threatens the retail base of a small town and the advertising base of its paper. One leads the latest edition of the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors newsletter; it's by Tim Waltner, publisher of the Freeman Courier in South Dakota and a member of the advisory board of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, which publishes The Rural Blog.

Responding to mailers from a new Costco store in Sioux Falls, 45 miles away from his town of 1,300, Waltner wrote, "It’s all good for Sioux Falls, which gets 2 percent of every sale in municipal sales tax revenue to help fund Sioux Falls infrastructure and Sioux Falls services. But it’s not so good for small towns like Freeman. In fact, it’s really bad for small towns like Freeman. . . . On the other hand, every dollar spent at a Freeman business bolsters one of our local businesses. . . . We enjoy a vibrant local retail community—two full-service grocery stores, for example—because we support it by purchasing our goods there."

Waltner acknowledges that there are things in Sioux Falls that you can't find in Freeman, "But the overwhelming majority of all our basic needs can be filled with purchases in Freeman. Buy them here and support our local businesses and our local economy. Buy them in Sioux Falls and support the Sioux Falls businesses and the Sioux Falls economy (or Mitchell's or Yankton's). It's really that simple." (Read more)