The holidays were invented to deplete your wallet and expand your waistline, right? Right. As such, this week in extra awesome included so many great things, including a lot of eating, drinking, and shopping local.
Every holiday season I try my best to shop small. It is great for the economy and it ensures ensures that nearly 70 cents on every dollar remains in the local economy. When you shop small, you help to build a better local economy, reduce environmental impact, put your taxes to good use, create jobs, get better customer service, keep the community unique, and you encourage local prosperity. This should be a conscious choice people make — to do most of their shopping local. A wise man once said, “Your dollars are votes, and when you spend money in your neighborhood/city at a locally owned shop, you are voting for the kind of neighborhood you want to live in.”
*Jumps off soapbox.*
Therefore, for the holidays this year (who am I kidding, I did all of my shopping last week), I patronized places like Park + Vine, King Arthur’s Court, Tom + Chee, Graeter’s, DigitalCustom, I Love Cincinnati Shoppe, Koch Sporting Goods, HOMAGE, The Library Friends’ Shop at the Main Library, MiCA 12/V, Krueger’s Tavern, Senate, Elm & Iron, Marty’s Hops and Vines, and Rhinegeist.
I also ate delicious food from Hathaway’s Diner, Neuf, Renegade Street Eats, Ingredients, Bacall’s Cafe, Sunny Deli, Abby Girl Sweets, Skyline, Gomez Salsa, Press on Monmouth*, E+O Kitchen, and Habits Cafe. In addition to all the good food, I got to have delicious beer from places like Listermann, D’Artagnan’s Deck (craft beer bar at Cintas Center during the Xavier game), The Woodburn (x3), Rhinegeist, Marty’s Hops and Vines, and The Growler House. We also spent time at Washington Park dog park, Urbana Cafe, got pie from O Pie O, and stocked up on goetta from Eckerlin Meats for the weekend.
It was a great week, and a wonderful start to the holidays. Have a great final week of 2016, and keep your eye out for some end-of-year posts this week, including some of my favorites from this past year and some places that are now gone but not forgotten.
*More on this later.
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