Buying local is something you can do to help the environment and your local economy. However, not everything that’s sold as local is really locally sourced.
For example, a manufacturers of food products, although local, may get the product ingredients from suppliers hundreds or thousands of miles away.
A local computer store, although they are just down the street, may be selling computers that are made overseas. A better choice may be to purchase a computer made in the USA even if it’s sold by a company in another state, such as Apple’s new Mac Pro.
When purchasing local, we need to inquire about the sourcing used by local vendors and manufacturers. If someone is simply ordering items from Amazon, and then putting them on shelves in the store, how is that any different from us ordering from Amazon directly?
There’s also the ethical choice to not purchase local in favor of having money go to support economies elsewhere. This is the idea behind the Ten Thousand Villages project.
The choice to buying locally isn’t always as simple as we may have once thought.