Christmas gifts bought locally swell the giving

Once the last piece of pumpkin pie has been dispatched, the next order of business is buying Christmas gifts.

That used to mean scurrying around town, finding parking places, hoofing it into stores, looking at their wares, buying gifts and moving on to the next store.

That still happens, although to a much less degree, considering the ease and efficiency of online buying. The National Retail Federation says that almost 21 percent of holiday sales were made online last year. And a graph of how online sales have grown over the years is almost as steep as a graph showing the sharp increase in covid infections over the past few weeks.

And, of course, now the two are intertwined, with the pandemic and Christmas holiday activity both going into high gear.

Certainly the stage is now set for enormous increases in holiday shopping to be done online. That’s a good thing in a number of ways. A shopper not walking into a store is a shopper who is either not spreading covid-19 to someone else or who is not becoming infected themselves. And now that Arkansas collects sales taxes on most online sales, the state, along with counties and cities, all benefit from online business.

But let’s pause for a moment to consider the local shopkeeper, the people who actually operate the brick-and-mortar businesses in our community. These are the mom-and-pop operations that include boutique stores, as well as restaurants and other local businesses that create part of the fabric that make up our cities and towns. We worry about them, and you should too.

You have probably heard it said before that small businesses are the backbone of the economy. It’s true. Small businesses peg high on almost any economic yardstick you want to measure them by. One is private-sector employment. Small businesses account for almost 50 percent of that in the country. And many of those businesses are quite small, with just a handful of employees.

That’s a lot of jobs that are dependent on the success of these businesses. And with the pandemic already pushing many companies and workers to the sidelines, conditions are already dire.

The point was brought home yesterday when we saw that a longtime eatery in the Dollarway area, Shannon’s Restaurant, had closed and plywood was placed on all of its windows. We immediately thought of the dedicated cooks and wait staff there and what they will do now. Will they have to file for bankruptcy? Will they not be able to pay their rent and be evicted? Will they even be able to feed themselves? It’s not as if a lot of businesses are hiring right now.

So this Christmas, let’s not make matters worse. To that end, we suggest looking locally to fill at least part of your gift-buying list. Think gifts that businesses can mail to you. Think gift certificates that you can sprinkle around to loved ones. These folks are just a phone call away, and we imagine they would love to help you anyway they can.

That might not sound like a game plan for keeping the local economy going, but like votes, they add up, and your help, combined with that of others, might be enough to get these businesses and their employees — people who you go to church with and live around the corner from — in a survivable place until we are all in a good place.