If we talk about groceries - from my experience there’s no reason to shop at big chains if there is a farmers market nearby. I bring my own reusable packaging for solid stuff and bottles for milk and juice. And people who run it are usually chill and just doing their thing.
But as we venture into tech territory - it becomes really muddy, many of people running small IT businesses in here are pompous arses. Like dude runs some musty basement and thinks of himself a Bill Gates.
milk seems to be much cheaper and available in skim varieties from the big chains as opposed to smaller stores, I still mostly shop at the smaller store though because it has cheaper vegetables and better meat
If we talk about groceries - from my experience there’s no reason to shop at big chains if there is a farmers market nearby. I bring my own reusable packaging for solid stuff and bottles for milk and juice. And people who run it are usually chill and just doing their thing.
That sounds nice.
But it could also be like this:
the big food store sells eggs from not-so-far-away, say a 200km radius. They are safe & fresh and don’t break on the way home. They might even have some fairly worthless guarantees on ethical farming.
the local farmer uses more pesticide/antibiotics than is legal because they think they can get away with it, because who’s going to check on such a small business. They exploit young workers to work below minimum wage because of some diffuse notion of local = ethical. Their hens live in horrifying conditions. And you actually pay more for the eggs despite all that, them being unwashed, and you bringing your own packaging.
Maybe I didn’t phrase it correctly, but what I meant is this: local and small is better, but only after everything else is at least as good as the non-local and big alternative.
Well, we here have a situation, where giving soapy baths to pigs (yes, that’s the job) at local farm may earn one 3 times the salary of entry IT job. Simply because it’s that hard to find workers these days, and don’t get me started on actual technical jobs - it’s near impossible to find a lathe machinist today.
So yeah, it all… depends… And yeah, there is one local business that I avoid, because it’s run by a guy associated with local conspiracy theorist clown. So yeah, I do little investigations to make sure I don’t give money to people who will then use it to make world a worse place.
If we talk about groceries - from my experience there’s no reason to shop at big chains if there is a farmers market nearby. I bring my own reusable packaging for solid stuff and bottles for milk and juice. And people who run it are usually chill and just doing their thing.
But as we venture into tech territory - it becomes really muddy, many of people running small IT businesses in here are pompous arses. Like dude runs some musty basement and thinks of himself a Bill Gates.
milk seems to be much cheaper and available in skim varieties from the big chains as opposed to smaller stores, I still mostly shop at the smaller store though because it has cheaper vegetables and better meat
That sounds nice.
But it could also be like this:
Maybe I didn’t phrase it correctly, but what I meant is this: local and small is better, but only after everything else is at least as good as the non-local and big alternative.
Well, we here have a situation, where giving soapy baths to pigs (yes, that’s the job) at local farm may earn one 3 times the salary of entry IT job. Simply because it’s that hard to find workers these days, and don’t get me started on actual technical jobs - it’s near impossible to find a lathe machinist today.
So yeah, it all… depends… And yeah, there is one local business that I avoid, because it’s run by a guy associated with local conspiracy theorist clown. So yeah, I do little investigations to make sure I don’t give money to people who will then use it to make world a worse place.