Where Does Your Money Go When You Shop Local?
The surprisingly long journey of one little purchase.
You buy a candle.
Seems simple enough.
You hand over $24, somebody hands you something that smells like cedar, vanilla, or whatever scent convinced you that your house needs to smell significantly better than it currently does, and the transaction is over.
Except that $24 may not be finished yet.
For a small business, one sale can start a surprisingly long chain. Part of it might go toward supplies. Some may cover packaging, processing fees, a website, booth costs, or the next batch of inventory.
Maybe the owner orders labels from another small business. Maybe they grab lunch from the restaurant next door while working a market. Maybe they pay a local photographer, printer, bookkeeper, or designer.
Eventually, some of it may make its way home too; toward groceries, utilities, school clothes, or whatever else real life happens to need that week.
That’s the interesting part about shopping local.
You’re not just buying the candle.
You’re stepping into a much bigger little economy.
The $24 Candle Has a Surprisingly Busy Schedule
Let’s stay with our candle for a minute.
That $24 does not immediately land in the business owner’s pocket.
That would be awesome if it did.
But unfortunately, wax is not free.
Neither are jars, wicks, fragrances, labels, boxes, tissue paper, credit-card processing, websites, market booths, insurance, equipment, advertising, or the mysterious collection of shipping supplies every small-business owner eventually seems to acquire.
Before the owner pays themselves anything, part of that sale is already headed in several different directions.
And every type of business has its own version of those directions.
The baker has flour, butter, packaging, kitchen equipment, and ingredients.
The jewelry maker has resin, metal, beads, tools, displays, and boxes.
The artist has paint, canvases, brushes, framing, and printing.
The farmer has seed, equipment, fuel, irrigation, labor, and a list we could probably keep adding to for the rest of the afternoon.
And all of these businesses have many other things that they need to produce their product.
So when you buy something from a small business, you’re are only seeing the finished product.
What you don’t see is everything that had to happen and everything that had to be purchased before that product ever made it onto the table.
Then the Money Starts Moving Again
Here’s where things get more interesting.
A small business doesn’t operate in a bubble. The candle maker may need labels. The baker may need boxes. The boutique may hire a photographer.
The small business selling at a Saturday market may buy coffee from the shop around the corner, grab lunch from a food truck, or order a banner from a local print shop.
One business can become a customer of another business, which becomes a customer of another one, and so on.
Then suddenly that original $24 candle has been surprisingly and very likely produced by the support of other small businesses.
This is part of the reason people talk so much about how important dollars are when they circulate locally.
A 2025 economic-impact study commissioned by American Express estimated that, on average, 68 cents of every dollar spent at a small U.S. business stays within the local community through the business’s own spending and the spending of its employees.
However, that doesn’t mean every $24 purchase magically stays within ten miles of where you bought it.
It does mean small businesses can create a much longer impact of their local economic activity than we see at a big chain business.
The Part You Don’t See at Checkout
Then there’s the part that’s easy to forget.
There’s usually a person on the other side of that business and sometimes it’s a whole team of people.
Sometimes it’s only one person doing absolutely everything. They may be answering emails at 10:47 at night while wondering why they ever thought they needed that many different varieties of tissue paper.
That business's income eventually helps pay people.
And those people have mortgages or rent, grocery bills, car payments, kids, pets, utility bills, soccer registration, and dentist appointments. Also sometimes they are so exhausted that order pizza instead of cooking dinner becomes a really good idea.
That matters in Idaho.
According to the U.S. Small Business Administration’s latest Idaho profile, Idaho had more than 207,000 small businesses, representing 99.2% of businesses in the state. And, those small businesses also employed about 56% of Idaho workers.
So when we talk about “small business,” we aren’t talking about some tiny part of Idaho’s economy.
We’re talking about a whole lot of Idaho.
No, This Does Not Mean You Have to Buy Everything Local
This is probably a good place to clear something up.
Supporting local doesn't mean you have to never buy at every big-box store, cancel your Amazon account, and begin only buying your own toothpaste from a someone at the Saturday market.
Real life doesn’t work that way.
Sometimes the big store has what you need. Maybe sometimes it’s cheaper. And sometimes it’s 8:30 at night and you need toilet paper immediately.
Shopping local doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing decision.
It might mean buying one birthday gift from an Idaho maker. Trying the little restaurant down the street. Maybe picking up honey from a local beekeeper or getting your Christmas cards from a local printer. And maybe it is just walking through a holiday market and buying one thing from someone who made it themselves.
One choice probably isn’t going to change the entire Idaho economy. But thousands of people making those little choices over and over might.
That starts to add up.
The Holidays Make All of This a Little More Visible
The holidays are when this becomes especially easy to see.
We’re already shopping around during this season.
There are gifts to buy, meals to plan, parties to attend, teachers to thank, stockings to fill, and that one person on your list that is impossible to shop for every single year.
And this is also when Idaho makers, bakers, artists, growers, shops, and other small businesses are putting some of their best work out into the world for you to see.
You might find a jar of local honey for the person who needs absolutely nothing. Maybe it is a handmade mug for the coffee person. Or it is a painting, candle, loaf of bread, piece of jewelry, ornament, box of treats, or something so wonderfully perfect that you immediately know exactly who it belongs to.
That’s one of our favorite things about shopping local.
You’re not just checking another name off the list. You’re discovering who is making things right here in Idaho.
So One Purchase Can Be Pretty Busy
So let’s go back to our $24 candle.
By now, part of that purchase may have helped replace supplies or paid a processing fee. Maybe it covered a little bit of the business’s overhead or helped pay for another market. It probably help put money toward the owner’s income and possibly sent a few dollars toward another business somewhere along the way.
And, the great thing is at the end of all that movement, you still got probably an awesome smelling candle.
That’s a pretty productive $24.
Supporting local doesn’t have to mean changing everything about the way you shop. Sometimes it just means stopping by a local businees and seeing what they may offer.
This could be the maker at the market. The family-owned restaurant. The artist working out of a home studio. The shop downtown. The person who turned an idea into a business and is still figuring it out one customer at a time.
And if one of those businesses gets one more sale because somebody decided to look local first may be small to that person, but it is huge to that local business.
That little purchase may have a longer journey than any of us realize.
Ready to Discover Something Local?
The official holiday shopping season is right around the corner, so we’re making that discovery a little easier.
The Valley Holiday Shop opens October 1, bringing Idaho businesses and their products together in one online holiday marketplace.
You don’t have to buy everything local. But maybe this year, you’ll discover one gift, one maker, or one Idaho business you didn’t know about before.
That sounds like a pretty good place to start.
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