by Meghan Collins and Amber Sallaberry

Imagine you are a one-dollar bill, crinkled in the stuffy pocket of a Reno foodie. Your short-term use for your transporter is to purchase tomatoes, who faces a decision: run to a big-box store or shop at the local grocer down the street. This is a choose-your-own-adventure story of a dollar bill spent in one of Reno’s locally owned grocers vs. that spent in a brand-name grocery chain.

OPTION 1: BIG -BOX SPECIAL!

Your shopper walks through the sliding doors to the produce section, where she notices a large pyramid of tomatoes on the left wall. Choosing tomatoes only takes an instant because they are all the same shape, size and faint smell.

As she checks out, your rumpled dollar-bill-self goes in the drawer next to a few others of its kind, and it begins the journey in our global economy. It’s a fact that only 43% of money spent in a non-local business remains in the community (www. the350project.net). Where does the rest go on this hypothetical journey?

You, the weary dollar, enter into a pool of many others of your kind. This pool is divided in many ways. The first destination is to the retailer, taking a large percent of the revenue to cover overhead. Payroll stays local, as do taxes and utilities, but there is a great deal of money that is spent afar. Sources of products, supplies, and equipment are likely to be sourced from out-of-town. These chain stores also have the buying power to purchase distributors in large quantities from far-away industrial zones, contract with overseas merchants, or to the intensive costs of transportation and packaging itself. Past the owner of the franchise, a portion of the monies heads to the corporation’s HQ for research and development on market trends (heard of green washing?), advertisement, and costs of lobbying the federal government.

National and transnational shareholders, depending on the chain, often times see a large portion of year-end profits. This is significant because those monies are not being rolled back into location where money was spent to improve it, where individuals might have a vested interest in improving the community.

OPTION 2: HAND-PICKED BASKET

One alternative path for our tomato dollar begins at the independent grocery store, taking the locally-owned food cooperative as an example. In this case, the breakdown is much simpler. Compared to the $43 above, in the local scenario $68 of $100 returns to the community through payroll, taxes, and other similar expenditures (www.the350project.net).

Shopping takes a bit longer in this case. The owner of the dollar is surprised by the tomato selection at the Co-op. Because this enterprise supports many local Nevada growers, there is a large variety to choose from: slicing tomatoes, vine-ripened tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, heirloom tomatoes and roma tomatoes.

The patron picks out a Cherokee purple heart heirloom and can smell its strong flavor even before cutting into it. The rumpled dollar is handed over to a worker paid a living wage for the region, and the patron’s eye catches a photo.

It depicts the farmer who grew the tomato. Next to this biography is a map of the Co-op’s ‘foodshed’ of the 95-mile radius around Reno, from which it aims to source the majority of its goods.

In the Co-op’s case, many supplies and equipment have been donated by members of the community. Some are recycled, some are handmade, and others come from other locally-owned businesses. The retail floor reflects a mentality of ‘bigger is not always better’, where products are sustainably produced and fresher, and where the space restriction might require you to get to know other ‘neighbors’ shopping alongside you.

Marketing in the case of the Co-op refers to education. Why is it important to buy local? What is the true cost of food, factoring in farm workers’ conditions and environmental aspects such as transportation and production methods? Why do individuals collaborate to form cooperatives in the first place? The list goes on…

The moral of the story is that spending the dollar locally provides more power to the region, as opposed to diluting it at a convenient franchise.

WANT TO KNOW MORE?  Visit www.greatbasinfood.coop or come and visit us at 542 Plumas St. Reno, NV 89509 (775) 324-6133