People, please put your money where your mouth is

In the past few months — since the covid-19 pandemic really got a foothold in the world and U.S., causing numerous lockdowns, shutdowns, stay-at-home orders, etc. — there have been a ton of memes on social media from people (mostly those who identify as “conservatives”) complaining about how the shutdown is hurting “main street small businesses. Now as the U.S. slowly “opens up” I’m seeing, from pretty much the same group of people, memes urging us in this country to “buy American” rather than (for example) labels marked “Made in China.”

While I personally am a big supporter of doing business in my neighborhood with locally-owned establishments, and do not have a problem with “buying American” I DO have a problem with and like to call out hypocrisy. But instead of posting a silly cliche meme on social media, I’m just going to write my message to these people who believe in and support “mom-and-pop businesses” and buying stuff made in the good ol’ USA, to put your money where your mouth is … in other words, practice what you preach. Either that or stop preaching. Please.

Ever since my first news reporter job back in the late 80s (that’s 1980’s, by the way, not 1880s) in a town of about 3,000 people at the time, I’ve been very much conscious of the concept of buying from local businesses. I knew as a newspaper employee that money from the businesses who bought ads with our paper helped pay our wages, so that was incentive to buy at those businesses. Back then the town where I had that first news job…