Shopping small any time of the year and Holiday closure

As the holidays approach we will start seeing more and more ads for various sales, incentives for shopping here or there and gift ideas galore. I would like to take a minute to share a few thoughts I have on it all. I recently received an email from a company I work with and it had the subject line, "It's almost time to shop small!" What? Isn't is always time to shop small? Over the past week or so, I've let this subject line roll around in my mind. While I appreciate the efforts to highlight the importance of supporting our small businesses through the Shop Small Saturday campaign, I think we need to be very conscientious to make this decision on more than one day.

The other aspect of shopping small is considering a small environmental impact of the items we purchase. Of course, we're in the business of promoting making your gifts. That's great. For those items we aren't going to make, let's think about packaging and what the item is--will it last or break quickly? Can we use alternatives to using a ton of wrapping paper and ribbon? Yep, we can. Keep an eye open here for a future post on this.

Now I know I am very much preaching to the choir with our audience. We value you all so much and know that you all value small businesses. Let's keep the conversation going to support our local businesses and small businesses in other communities, so we move beyond needing a Shop Small Saturday. Supportland (Portland's network of local businesses) is a great place to start reading up on the benefits of supporting local businesses and you can find a very informative article here.

We are taking a couple days off for Thanksgiving. We'll be closed Thursday and Friday, November 26th and 27th. We look forward to seeing you and wish you all a very happy Thanksgiving.