Somerville Local First Joins Thousands of New England Businesses to Promote PLAID Friday!

On November 22nd, the Boston Globe published an Op-Ed (http://bit.ly/PlaidFriday) on their website detailing a regional, New England campaign to encourage residents to Shift their Holiday Shopping to locally owned independent businesses, starting with the re-imagining of Black Friday as PLAID FRIDAY.

Today, Somerville Local First joins a dozen New England nonprofit local business networks, representing thousands of member businesses, in a social media and word of mouth campaign designed to encourage local shopping this Friday and beyond. New Englanders are projected to spend $700 this holiday season and every dollar spent locally creates up to three times the economic activity in our communities.1

In each of the past two years, studies have shown that local businesses operating in communities with Local Business networks have consistently outperformed their counterparts during the holiday season.2 With the launch of this campaign, Somerville Local First hopes to build on that success and strengthen the local economy this holiday season and beyond.

1 Civic Economics - http://www.civiceconomics.com/AndersonvilleStudy.pdf.
2 http://www.newrules.org/retail/news/holiday-sales-increase-independent-businesses-national-survey-finds