OUR VIEW

For the brave among us, the sales await.

Shop Small Saturday is finally here, a chance for us to find our favorite place in Bladen County and pay them a visit as we ratchet up our shopping for the holidays.

Oh, don’t tell us about caving in and going to an internet website. We understand health reasons, and we’re certainly not suggesting everyone pile into the stores elbow to elbow like we’ve done decade after decade. It’s not wise and we can’t even if we wanted to anyway.

But what we can do is check in with our favorite merchants. We’ve got a lot of ways to do that, including in person but also by telephone or social media. Find out what they’ve got going on. Some of them are advertising right here in these pages.

Perhaps they’ve created some unique ways for us to shop with them.

The big thing, of course, is to keep the dollars here in Bladen County. That’s why Shop Small Saturday was created in the first place. It’s a way to rival Black Friday and Cyber Monday when the big box, chain behemoths suck up every penny possible.

We’re three weeks from the last shopping Saturday before Christmas, so this thing is going to get here fast.

We need to help our neighbors, the folks we see on a regular basis in our restaurants, at the grocery stores, at the biggest celebrations of our lives. We need to see the people who see us every day, passing on the street or being active on social media.

Our county is challenged in many ways, and its fruitful and bounteous in others. When we decide we can spend our hard-earned dollars here, we’re fueling the economy where we need to see it spurred the most.

Those sales tax dollars keep our county services available. When they disappear, so too do the jobs of some mighty fine people we call our friends.

We’re not anti-big box or anti-chain. Those places are terrific, and we all hit ’em up for things every now and again. But let’s face it — we spend a dollar or three there, and the majority of it isn’t helping here at home.

Dollars, after all, don’t recognize county lines.

But spending them here does help create demand for the shopkeepers. Our hope is we do enough business here that requires some of them to hire — or in this year of the unusual — to rehire.

Shop Small Saturday doesn’t take a year off for a virus, or anything else. And the majority of merchants throughout Bladen County certainly haven’t just up and left. They need us to do our thing so they can keep doing their thing.

Supply and demand. Times are going to be tight for a lot of people this Christmas, but we can all certainly help each other.

Shop Small Saturday. And tell a friend.