We all know that buying local is important. We also know that sometimes it’s not as easy as we’d like it to be. As an end of the year review we thought it would be interesting to see what percentage of our spending was done with Whatcom County owned businesses, Washington owned businesses and those owned outside of Washington.
These figures excludes wages and taxes.
I won’t say we were surprised by these results as much as pleased. We acknowledge that there is some room for improvement. However, the fact that 86.7% of spending was done within Whatcom County and 89.3% was within Washington isn’t too shabby! The results also gave us a few ideas for areas of improvement:
- Identify and use more locally owned gas stations
- Switch to a Whatcom County owned tire shop (which we recently discovered)
- Find a local insulation dealer
The next big challenge will be sourcing materials made in the United States. This is not a new idea; and luckily a Montana based builder has already started compiling a list of materials made in the States that we can utilize. That doesn’t make this challenge less daunting, especially when paired with a focus on buying locally. That said we are confident that a few local suppliers will be interested in sourcing American made materials. This process may be slow, and labor intensive, but we think it’s worthy of our time and energy.
by Intellitonic