Resources

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Ypsilanti residents Amanda Maria Edmonds and Richard Murphy wrote an "Other Voices" piece for the Ann Arbor News on Nov. 25, outlining some of the benefits of shopping locally. They note that an op-ed piece isn't quite long enough for properly citing sources, and have provided the following links as references for readers interested in digging deeper:

• We used the US Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2006 data on consumer expenditures breakdowns. Specifically, the second quintile of households in the BLS data matches Ypsilanti well in terms of median income, number of residents per household, and number of automobiles per household: ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ce/share/2006/quintile.txt


• Current data on number of households in the City of Ypsilanti and in Washtenaw County came from the 2007 SEMCOG Community Profiles: http://www.semcog.org/cgi-bin/comprof/profiles.cfm


• Market analysis firm Maritz is the source of the figure that American households will spend an average of $637 on holiday gifts this year: http://www.maritz.com/newsreleases/maritz-black-friday.html


• We consulted several studies on the comparative local economic impacts of local vs. chain and internet retailers. These included studies of
• Andersonville, IL (http://civiceconomics.com/Andersonville/AndersonvilleStudy.pdf);
• San Francisco, CA (http://www.civiceconomics.com/SF/SFRDS_May07.pdf);
• the Mid-coast Maine region (http://newrules.org/retail/midcoaststudy.pdf);
• and Austin, TX (http://amiba.net/pdf/Economic_Impact_study_tx.pdf)

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Think Local First, is a county-wide organization whose mission is to support and cultivate locally-owned, independent businesses that are committed to making our community a healthier and more vibrant place to live. www.thinklocalfirst.net