DeKALB: Joyce Waters wants you to feel at home in her downtown DeKalb shop – so much so, she might even feed you doughnuts and give you coffee while you look around – a kind of customer service specific to a business that appreciates its community.
Through the Shop Local initiative, members of the chamber can post coupons and discounts to be spent at their business for a given amount of time. The program is year round, but it’s near the holidays that the chamber amps up its promotion, Duffy said.
“We’ve done the shop local on our website for about five-plus years,” he said. “We ramp it up at certain times – if we do it all the time, it becomes white noise.”
It’s the idea of spending money in a way that will benefit local people, that the chamber and local business-owners are trying to promote.
But in the age of Amazon and eBay, it’s foolish to expect people to stop buying outside their community entirely, Duffy said.
“Online is a huge part of today’s world. … It’s a change in the way people think,” he said. “Years and years ago, there wasn’t that thought process. There wasn’t online to compete with.”
But some local entrepreneurs have been able to use the immediacy and pervasiveness of the Internet to their advantage.
Allison Johnson, owner of Bliss Beads, uses online platforms like Etsy and a personal website to sell her handmade jewelery to more than just the local community, she said. By promoting herself both online and throughout DeKalb, she’s been able to establish some regular customers.
