Deciding whether to be bothered means figuring out whether the hassles that come with responsibility to localism outweigh the hassles linked with your responsibility to everything else in your life. If I had to rush from the office for an interview out of town, it wouldn’t be feasible to wait for the Metro, which only comes once every half hour and might not go where I need to anyway. If I had children, or was caring for an older member of my family, the convenience of having a car becomes a necessity and one-stop shopping is a godsend. As for prices for local products, besides clothing on the peninsula, which is dominated by obscenely expensive boutiques, most of the local staple goods I bought were priced comparably to chain stores, and sometimes they were cheaper. What living locally requires isn’t necessarily more money, it’s more planning. It will take longer to get home if you shop in small increments every day and you walk. You’ll need to plan your shopping route to make sure you know where to get everything you need (no more wandering into Wild Oats, famished, and grabbing whatever catches your eye). Mostly, you’ll need to be flexible. If you can’t find it locally, fine then, go to a chain or buy online. But try not to do it too often.
Creature of habit
“Some people think about community and make an ethical and a philosophical choice [to buy local] and there are others, like us, who choose this place because of practical reasons,” says Jamie Parker, 35, the trails manager for Portland Trails. Parker, his wife Leah, and their two boys Jonah, 4, and Elias, 2, live on Munjoy Hill and shop locally, on foot, whenever they can. They share a minivan with another family in their building and Jamie owns a truck that he uses to transport equipment for work. Many of their friends are localists. “As a practical issue, some of us are more rigid about it and some of us will go with whatever’s convenient.”
My living local experience did make me feel more connected to my community, hokey as that sounds. The small size of most of these stores, and the smaller selection of products they carry, assigns a personality to each shop. You go to Micucci if you want some great olive oil imported from Italy, or Fresh Approach if you want good meats and enough veggies for a side dish. But you don’t go anywhere for everything. That is the purview of the Maine Mall.
