Thrift Week 2021: The local edition

The COVID pandemic has been particularly hard on small, local businesses. Since it started, roughly ten stores in our town have closed their doors for good, including our beloved local toy store, our real live record shop, a jewelry store, a vintage clothing store, and a Greek cafe. And while, surprisingly, some new businesses have actually opened, I still feel like I should have done more to help the ones we lost. I did my best to throw a little business their way during the shutdown, but it was only a drop in the bucket.

So I decided that Thrift Week 2021 is going to be my most ambitious Local Shopping Challenge yet: for this entire week, I will buy everything locally.

For purposes of this challenge, I'm defining "local" to mean within walking distance, rather than just within the boundaries of Highland Park. That means I can still go to the nearest Starbucks (in New Brunswick), and we can go to the nearest hardware store (in Edison) if we need to fix something in an emergency. But we have to go to that nearby place, even if Home Depot is cheaper and has a bigger selection. We can buy our groceries from the local Stop & Shop, the H-Mart in Edison, or the George St. Co-Op in New Brunswick, but we can't go to Shop Rite, Coscto, or Trader Joe's for the things that are cheaper there. If we want a book we can't find at the library, we can try the local thrift shop or the small Barnes & Noble in New Brunswick, but we can't just order it online. (Locally owned businesses that no longer have a storefront but still have an online presence, such as Raritan Market, will also count.)

Of course, I could just get around this by putting off any non-essential purchases until the week is over, which wouldn't exactly do our local businesses any good. So to ensure that my local shopping challenge actually involves shopping local, I'm adding another requirement: I must make at least one purchase from a local business each day of the challenge. Yes, even if that means buying things I don't actually need. Brian and I are among the lucky ones who are doing just fine in the middle of this economic crisis, so we can certainly afford to spend a little extra money helping out those who are struggling.

Each day, I'll log in to share what I purchased, how much it cost, and how much (if any) extra I spent to buy it locally as opposed to shopping at my usual venues. At the end of the week, I'll tot it all up, calculate how much my week of local shopping cost in total, and extrapolate to figure out how much it might cost to shop this way all the time — or at least until the pandemic is over — and whether it's worthwhile.

Here's my haul for today:

1. Two bottles of "super magnesium" tablets from the local Rite Aid. This is something I actually needed, and something I would normally buy there, but I was lucky enough to find them on sale today: buy one, get one free. So both bottles together cost me $10, which is half what I'd normally pay.

2. A bunch of organic scallions from Stop&Shop for $1. This is more than we'd normally pay, but we needed the scallions right away and didn't want to make a separate trip to H-Mart just to save 70 cents. 

3. A package of cupcake wrappers, also from Stop&Shop, for $2. Brian told me I could have any kind of cake I wanted for my birthday, and I chose the chocolate angel cupcakes from our "Delicious Desserts" cookbook, so we needed some cupcake liners. This is something we don't normally buy, so I don't know whether $2 for 75 of them (which should be something like a ten-year supply at the rate we use them) is a good price, but again, even if we could have saved a buck somewhere else, it wasn't worth the extra trip.

So my first day of local shopping was pretty successful. We found everything we needed, and we actually spent around $8.30 less in total than we normally would. On the other hand, these purchases were pretty utilitarian, rather than fun or special. But I'm sure that will change as the week goes on.