

(Broadside Bookshop) Support your local small business

The Wall Street Journal reports on cash mobs, a variant on flash mobs in which groups of people show up to spend money at a selected locally owned small business:

The first known cash mob was the brainchild of Chris Smith, an engineer for Oracle Corp. The 37-year-old from Buffalo, N.Y., says the idea stemmed from his realization that consumers, including his wife, tend to flock to smaller establishments when a bargain is available through the daily-deal social-networking sites including Groupon Inc. and LivingSocial Inc. "Why do we need a discount to support good, solid, local businesses?" he asks. He used Twitter and Facebook to rally more than 100 people to purchase wine at City Wine Merchant on Aug. 5. Business that day tripled, according the store's president, Eric Genau. "We have clients that would have taken a lot longer to get here or never would have gotten here at all if not for that," Mr. Genau says.

This is a nice, feel-good idea, and several small business owners are quoted saying similar things—sales doubled or tripled for a day. But is there potential here for broad-based change? Occupy Cleveland's blog is quoted saying cash mob "isn't a political or social organization … or meant to be an answer to economic crisis," and they have a point. At the same time, it could be a political or social movement-building action, and it doesn't have to be limited to local small business.

One of the problems with consuming virtuously or intentionally as an individual is precisely that it happens as an individual, and no one necessarily knows why you bought as you did. If you buy Seventh Generation toilet paper, there's a good bet you did so for environmental reasons, but if you shop at Safeway rather than Whole Foods, it might be because of location or cost or any of a number of things other than that Safeway is a union employer and Whole Foods most emphatically is not. Just as our individual small contributions to political candidates gain meaning when they come through the Orange to Blue list, where candidates know both what general principles put them on that list and how many small contributions have come in under that umbrella, a cash mob makes visible a set of consumer decisions and what aspects of a business these people have embraced. It can be local small business or union employers or environmental considerations or anything else.

Doubling the sales of one store on one day isn't a recipe for social or economic change. But using the cash mob concept to start reshaping people's shopping habits in a visible way within a social context that supports the change and gives it public meaning—at some point that does turn into change, in a move your money kind of way.