This holiday season keeping your spending local means your buying a better community tomorrow. Here are then reasons why:

1. Local Character and Prosperity; In an increasingly homogenized world, communities that preserve their one-of-a-kind businesses and distinctive character have an economic advantage.

2. Community Well-Being: Locally businesses build strong communities by sustaining vibrant town centers, linking neighbors in a web of economic and social relationships, and contributing to local causes.

3. Keeping Dollars in the Local Economy: Locally owned businesses recycle a much larger share of their revenue back into the local economy, enriching the whole community.

4. Job and Wages: Locally businesses create jobs locally and, in some sectors, provide better wages and benefits.

5. Entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurship fuels America’s economic innovation and prosperity, and serves as a key means for families to move out of low-wage jobs and into the middle class.

6. Environmental Sustainability: Local stores help to sustain vibrant, compact, walkable town centers-which in turn are essential to reducing sprawl, automobile use, habitat loss, and air and water pollution.

7. Competition: A marketplace of tens of thousands of small businesses is the best way to ensure innovation and low prices over the long-term.

8. Product Diversity: A multitude of businesses, each selecting products based, not on a national sales plan, but on their own interests and the needs of their local customers, offers broader range of product choices.

9. 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.

10. Public Benefits and Costs: Local stores in town centers require comparatively little infrastructure and make more efficient use of public services relative to big box stores and strip shopping malls.

This list comes from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a national nonprofit organization working to strengthen independent businesses and local economies, and is reprinted here with permission.