Newark Notts Newark Community Website
Top 10 Reasons to Support Locally Owned Businesses
- Local Character and Prosperity – We are very fortunate in Newark in that, along with the big names and chains that every High Street needs, we have such a wide array of interesting, quirky and unique local shops that serve us well and help to bring in so many visitors. So make the most of them!
- Community Well-Being – Locally-owned businesses build strong communities by sustaining vibrant town centres, linking neighbours in a web of economic and social relationships, and contributing to local causes.
- Local Decision-Making – Local ownership ensures that important decisions are made locally by people who live in the community and who will feel the impacts of those decisions.
- Keeping Pounds in the Local Economy – Compared to chain stores, locally owned businesses recycle a much larger share of their revenue back into the local economy, enriching the whole community.
- Jobs and Wages – Locally-owned businesses create more jobs locally and, in some sectors, provide better wages and benefits than chains do.
- Entrepreneurship – Entrepreneurship fuels the UK’s economic innovation and prosperity, and serves as a key means to help families move out of low-wage jobs and into the middle class.
- Public Benefits and Costs – Local stores in town centres require comparatively little infrastructure and make more efficient use of public services relative to big box stores and strip shopping malls.
- Environmental Sustainability – Local stores help to sustain vibrant, compact, walkable town centres – which in turn are essential to reducing sprawl, vehicle use, habitat loss, and air and water pollution.
- Competition – A marketplace of thousands of small businesses is the best way to ensure innovation and low prices over the long-term. And Newark Market itself offers scores of stalls delivering low prices to consumers while providing a low-cost entry-level business opportunity to traders. Plus it’s a magnet for shoppers from Newark and its surrounding area, and has been for centuries.
- Product Diversity – A multitude of small businesses, each selecting products based not on a national sales plan, but on their own interests and the needs of their local customers, guarantees a much broader range of product choices. It’s easy to find examples on the streets of Newark – unique stores such as Indian Summer, stocked with the handicrafts of Jaipur, or restaurants such as The Danube, drawing on the cuisine of 10 European countries. Now that’s diversity!
