May 7, 2020 — One of the strategies for reviving the local economy is a strong shop local campaign, which, in the social distancing era, involves ramping up online purchasing opportunities. Retail is opening up in Phase II, though place-based physical browsing is still somewhere in the middle distance.
In the meantime, City Council members and the Chambers of Commerce in Willits, Ukiah, and Fort Bragg have joined local small business owners to create lovelocalmendo.com, a platform for shoppers who still have a little money to spend, and want to keep it circulating among their neighbors.
Maureen Mulheren is a City Councilwoman from Ukiah. She and her council colleagues, Jessica Morsell-Haye of Fort Bragg, and Greta Kanne of Willits, are all small business owners themselves. Mulheren is grateful that Ukiah has a more diversified tax base than the coast, which relies heavily on tourism.
Tourism is supposed to be a big part of Katrina Kessen’s job, since she’s the new Executive Director of the Greater Ukiah Business and Tourism Alliance. It’s a hybrid organization of the Chamber of Commerce, the Main Street Program, which sponsors initiatives to entice people intS the downtown shopping district, and Visit Ukiah, the city’s marketing and tourism arm. She started the job about a month and a half ago, just as the recession was getting underway.
With business owners and everyone else overwhelmed by the rapidly changing pace of events, she said, “We decided to do what chambers typically do, which is rally local businesses together.” It’s an effort to combine the tried and true methods of the chamber of commerce with the flexibility of social media. “There are people who have gotten quite creative with offering Instagram platforms to shop from. There are ways that people have been doing business,” she notes.
But social media is like money: it’s really great, if you have it. In a county with spotty internet, a lot of local businesses don’t have much of a web presence, unless you count a few stale comments on yelp. And all those clunky acronyms which were supposed to signify governmental financial aid have not materialized in any meaningful way. Mulheren says the idea of the lovelocalmendo platform isn’t just commerce. It’s an effort to re-create the sense of a hometown market, where people go to have an experience, which might include exchanging goods and services. “You can buy a book on Amazon, but that’s not like going to the bookstore,” she points out. But even with the shops closed, there’s a way to bring some meaningful feeling into buying goods. “It’s about the experience of really loving Mendocino County and our businesses and shopping local, and less about buying a thing,” she urges.
Several businesses on the platform are based on specific experiences: the Skunk Train, a couple of inns, and a lot of wineries where people go specifically to be convivial in close proximity to one another. It’s a huge social shift, using online shopping to delay gratification by booking a room or a seat on the train months from now. To spend money on something just to enjoy it in a limited way, so workers at non-essential businesses can buy a few essentials.