EDITORIAL: Help yourself by shopping in local stores

Shop ‘til your fingertips drop.

That doesn’t have much of a holiday season ring to it, does it?

And yet, the majority of America’s shoppers chose online versus in-person purchases over the Thanksgiving weekend shopping blitz.

Chew on these numbers for a moment:

• From Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday, a record 200.4 million people searched websites and visited stores for gifts, according to the National Retail Federation. (The total last year was 196.7 million.)

• The average purchase was $321.41.

• More people shopped online than in stores, according to NRF. The number of online shoppers this year was greater than last year, while the number of in-store shoppers was less.

• Holiday online sales figures are going up. On Black Friday, online shoppers spent $9.8 billion (up 7.5% from 2022). Cyber Monday did even better; $12.4 billion (up 9.6%).

That’s a massive fortune shipped one way — out of town forever.

Every dollar you spend in a local store strengthens your community. Your money pays the store’s workers. These workers aren’t automatons with name tags. They’re your neighbors, your fellow high school boosters, your fellow taxpayers with skin in the day-to-day, year-to-year game. And the money they then have to spend in the community very well could support your business and our job, too.

Speaking of taxpayers, when you spend in a local store, that helps fund government services at all local levels, including parks, streets and law enforcement. When you complete a credit card transaction online, almost every penny ends up outside Kootenai County. Corporations benefit, and a tiny bit trickles down to the people who deliver goods to purchasers, but the vast majority of your hard-earned dollar disappears, never to be seen here again.

While convenience is an irrefutable advantage to online shopping, weigh that against the in-store shopping experience. In local stores, you can actually check out the products you’re considering buying. How high quality is the fabric? Does the product look in real life like it does in photos? How exactly does the gizmo work — and is there a test model you can play with?

Online, good luck getting your questions answered on the spot by knowledgeable, helpful service representatives. 

Holiday shopping online, when’s the last time a human being smiled at you, handed over the packages and wished you a very merry Christmas?

Exactly.