Something you should go Something you should know is brought to you by Genesis gooldirea dot com. That's also something you should know. You can put your retirement plan on the gold Standard. Get all of the information and a free gold and silver guide at Genesis Gooldiura dot com. Excited to have Chris Larsen joined me from Comfort King. Hello, sir, how are you good?
How are you doing?
John? I'm fantastic And we're going to talk today about buy local, which is something that I think is a really important thing. As a local business owner and you're a local business owner, it means a lot to us. But this should mean a lot to even people who are not business owners. It should mean a lot to them because local businesses do a lot for their community, don't they.
Yeah, So I decided to start a business group that actually represents small business because we actually don't have a voice in South Dakota. Small local businesses don't have a voice. We don't have a group that represents us. You know, there's other business groups, but they represent big business. Yeah, And so there's a couple of things I want to
do with this group. It's free to join right now, but eventually if we get an enough members, then we'll start doing the dues every year, maybe one hundred bucks a year. And what that money will do, it won't pay for any salaries. It will pay to advertise the concept of buy local. What we want to do is educate our fellow citizens in South Dakota why it's important
to keep it local and to keep our money here. Because, you know, I was researching this, there's over two hundred thousand people in South Dakota that work for a small business. That's a lot of people. That's a lot more I would have guessed. Now they call small business. I think anybody any company under three hundred employees. This group is kind of for companies under one hundred, although I will make exceptions to certain companies if they want to join.
Like I've talked to Great Life, talk to companies like Lewis Drug. You know that I consider that a local company absolutely. And what I think most people who aren't in business don't understand is that even though our town may be grown, like, people are spending more and more money on the internet. Oh and I'm not anti internet.
This isn't what this is about. You know, it's okay to spend money on the internet sometimes, but you should try to keep your money local because a lot of these businesses you can You can think, if I go into Lewis or Shiels or High V I can buy every single thing in there on a website. And just imagine if everyone did that. And what would our town look like if Shields, Lewis, Hive's all just disappeared, Ace Hardware, What if they all just disappeared? What would life look like?
It would be very sad, honestly. Yeah, think of the jobs you would be killing. And I'll tell you I lived in a small town in Iowa for a short while, and during the time I lived in that small town, our grocery store closed. They had like a broaster chicken thing and they had a fire in the kitchen and it burned up and closed. And so now the nearer the closest grocery store is twenty miles away. You know how much that stinks When you got to drive twenty miles for a gallon of milk.
They call it that a food desert. That's it. It's horrible.
Well, and they rebuilt, thank goodness. It was wonderful that they rebuilt. But during the time they were closed I had a whole new appreciation for the convenience of having a grocery store right up the street. And it's not just groceries. If you're working on a project and you need this one little thing to finish it, and you're like, oh, hey, now that hardware store that I used to go to is gone because people buy stuff on the internet, Well I got to wait for it.
That's what I'm trying to do with this business club is to get enough people joined in so that we can actually start promoting the idea of buying local and why it's healthy for a community. You know, we all like living in South Dakota, we like living in Sioux Falls, and there's a reason, you know, And so we want
to keep it healthy. And the employees that work at small businesses are usually pretty well paid, and so and the people that work for big companies, big organizations like the school system and the hospitals and all these governments and stuff. A lot of times they don't necessarily think about that they should feel obligated in any way to buy local, And we want to just kind of educate them, right, raise awareness. So it's called buylocal sd dot net nice
and it's easy to sign up. You just send me an email info at buylocal sd dot net nice and you're you're a member. And if we get to stage two, which I think we will, where we implement dues of like I said, not very much money, but you can decide to join or bail out then. But right now, I'm just kind of testing the water to see if there's enough interest by local companies, you know, smaller companies,
because we really don't have a voice. If you look at like the Chamber of Commerce, for example, and you look at who's on the board there, and it's it's representatives or owners or CEOs of the largest companies in the state. They don't think about us.
They don't have a different they have a different, different needs.
Yeah, they're okay with raising sales tax, for example. And that's the other aspect of why I started this is because I've been paying attention to what's going on in our local governments a lot more in the last two years. And I've seen, like in this last legislature just a few weeks ago, they tried to raise the sales tax for the whole state. And we know that the mayor of Sioux Falls wants to get the power to raise
the sales tax. So you want he's been trying to get the power from the legislature to be able to raise city sales tax. Right now, Sue falls at two percent, and he'd like to raise that to three is what we've heard. And why, well, it's too so they can do some project downtown. And look, I like having a nice downtown too, But I don't know why we have to have so much focus on just downtown Sue Falls. It's a big city, yeah, you know, we have a
lot of different neighborhoods and different communities. Spread aground a bit, yeah, spread around a little bit. And by the way, don't raise sales tax like I'm a retailer. I'm an unpaid tax collector for the state, and you're putting the burden on me to collect money from people at the at
the time of purchase. And by the way, you're also raising sales tax on the lowest income people because they on the groceries they so it's putting an unfair burden just to benefit a few, you know, fortunate companies that will make money off this development. And you know, we can debate, do we really need a new convention Center downtown Sioux Falls. I don't think we do, but that's
not really what it's about anyway, exactly. So I want this group to eventually be able to hire a lobbyist that can represent our best interests because we don't have that in peer right now. We don't have anyone that we can send that can say, hey, I represent a group of you know, one hundred or one thousand South Dakota businesses who employ you know, thirty thousand.
Far more than that. There's so many small businesses in this community. And if there's a small business owner listening that's going, how do I get involved in this? This sounds crazy, but my kind of crazy. It's my kind of crazy. To Chris, I love this and I'm a supporter. I'll be there, tell me what I can do to help, And.
You don't even have to do anything if you don't like we might have meetings once a month, people can get together. If you don't want to do that, you don't have to a lot of small business owners are kind of like I was for most of my thirty years. Is I didn't want to go join clubs and do stuff with other people because I was working too much. I just wanted to go home, so you don't have
to engage. But we also want to be able to open up a community that we can offer mentorship, you know, that you can tap into and say, hey, you know, I've got this issue. Maybe it's advertising, maybe it's a problem with the government, or you just you know, need
to figure something out. Some of us have some experience, you know, I've been I've been retailing and manufacturing for thirty years, so I can I see my industry the way it's set up, you know, and how the big companies think, you know, your Sealy, Serta, Simmons, and honestly, they don't really care about the end user. They don't care about the customer. And small smaller companies tend to care more about the customer. They offer real service down
the road. And my industry, they're really pushing the box bed thing. That's what got me interested in the buy local message was that they were my industry is pushing the idea of buying a online and you know, that's just anti human because what you're doing when you're buying a bed in a box or a bet off of the internet, you're buying a bed that really didn't have any human quality control manufacturing. No humans touched it. It's
all robots basically. And you know what's the pride in that it's something you use a third of your life, every day of your life, eight.
Hours a night hopefully.
So we're pro people. Yeah, we're pro people.
If somebody would like to get more information, buy local SD dot net. Is that the best place to go.
That's the website, it's under construction right now, or actually waiting for a volunteer. This is a this is a volunteer organization.
So if your small business builds websites, you reach out right away. Yeah, so if they want to send an email, that's ready to go. Info at buylocal sd dot net. Very nice, Chris, thanks for coming in man. I appreciate it. Oh, thank you for helping raise awareness again, Chris Larsen. Buy local SD dot net. Something you should know is brought to you by Genesis gold Ila dot com. Put your retirement plan on the Gold Standard. Get a free Gold and Silver guide now at Genesis gooldi ra a dot com