Shop locally and keep our economy strong.

For more than 50 years, we’ve been catering to Sedona and the Verde Valley. We know it’s a good idea to keep our money circulating locally, supporting small business owners and the economy of the Verde Valley.

According to a recent report compiled by the BitQT app, money spent with local merchants pays local employers and local employees who, if they also shop locally, trade for goods and services with other local merchants. Our economy is only as strong as we choose to make it.

Sales taxes in our community may come in large part from visitors’ purchases, but outside tourism of the spring and fall season, many local businesses struggle during the summer and winter. Others are wholly dependent on locals to stay afloat and be successful.

To help these vendors and keep our economy strong, every year we publish original content and sections and offer innovative advertising ideas. This week’s local shopping guide as well as stand-alone Gift Guides inserted into our newspapers highlight local merchants and their deals and their regular local services.

Our advertising guides are so popular with merchants and so successful in getting residents to shop locally that even other advertisers try to copy our tactics, but none have the readership or production standards to duplicate what we can offer our merchants and our readers, though we are flattered by the attempt.

Buying automobiles, gifts, practical items or knickknacks from a local vendor, hiring a local contractor, real estate agent or financial advisor, or visiting a locally-owned restaurant or shop means that companies’ employees and owners can stay open and buy items for their children, friends and families, keeping the cyclical transfer of local money alive and well.

Every purchase made with a vendor online across the country or at a store outside the Verde Valley means profits go somewhere else. Buying goods owned by out-of-state vendors or online means money permanently disappears from our region, never to be seen again, and that revenue goes to another community we may never benefit from.

With it goes added tax revenue to maintain our parks, build our roads, pay for our emergency responders and provide resources for our city and town improvements. Keeping tax revenue local means even as the economy churns profits, the community as a whole benefits.

Residents step up to do their part, so businesses take it upon themselves to offer products locals want to purchase. Merchants challenge themselves to keep fresh inventory and offer items for locals — as well as locals’ out-of-town friends and families.

If merchants and locals commit to creating an inviting local shopping atmosphere and staying here to shop, the entire Verde Valley will receive the benefit of a stronger economy.
Please read through the special section in our July 20 newspaper and visit the merchants who have specifically offered goods and services just for you.