Homegrown Economics

In Boulder, local businesses stay ahead of the chains

By Stacy Mitchell, Orion Afield
July/August 2002 Issue

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If you visit Boulder, Colorado, you

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can’t miss it. It’s displayed on the door or window of nearly every locally owned business in town: the Mountain Sun Pub & Brewery on Pearl Street, Heritage Bank on Ninth, Albums on the Hill. Stop for coffee at Sidney’s Cafe and it’ll be on the side of your cup. At the Boulder Book Store you’ll find it on the complimentary bookmarks. Open up the Boulder Weekly and you’ll see it in advertisements for local video and music stores.This widely visible symbol—two arrows circling into each other, much like the mark on a recyclable container—is the logo for the Boulder Independent Business Alliance (BIBA), a pioneering coalition of nearly 150 locally owned businesses determined to defend the city’s homegrown economy from takeover by out-of-town chains. Like everything BIBA does, the logo conveys an important lesson in community economics: Compared to their chain competitors, locally owned businesses recycle a higher percentage of their revenue and profits back into the local economy.BIBA’s primary mission is to make the "local or chain?" choice a significant consideration for Boulder residents. Recent national trends provide a sobering picture of what BIBA is up against. Since 1990 more than 13,000 locally owned pharmacies have closed. The market share of independent bookstores has fallen from 58 percent in 1972 to just 15 percent today. Local hardware dealers are disappearing too. Home Depot and Lowe’s have captured one-third of that market. Five companies account for about 42 percent of all grocery sales. Blockbuster Video rents one of every three videos nationwide. A single corporation, Wal-Mart, now captures 7 percent of all consumer retail spending.Preventing Boulder from succumbing to these trends has long been a concern of David Bolduc, owner of the 29-year-old Boulder Book Store, which occupies a four-story building in the heart of downtown. "I wanted to develop a way to inform people of the differences between chain stores and independents," he says. Local businesses are owned by people who live in the community and are invested in its future. Their kids attend local schools. Their tax dollars pay for local services. They are often actively involved in civic and cultural organizations. By doing business with our neighbors, Bolduc believes, we build a web of personal and economic relationships that are essential to a strong community.
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