By Keysha Drexel
Journal editor
As the co-owner of Church Street Coffee and Books in Mountain Brook, Carrie Rollwagen has seen firsthand the impact “shop local” campaigns can have on small businesses, and for the last three years, the Crestline Village shop has participated in Small Business Saturday events.
But this year, Rollwagen has taken her local shopping campaign a step further by writing an entire book about the growing movement to support independent businesses.
On Nov. 29, Shop Small Saturday, Rollwagen will host a launch party for her book, “The Localist: Think Independent, Buy Local and Reclaim the American Dream,” which was self-published with the help of money raised through a Kickstarter campaign.
Part memoir and part nonfiction, the book tells the story of the year Rollwagen spent buying only from Alabama-owned stores, taking readers through all the good things – and the not-so-good things – about shopping locally.
“I wanted to weigh the pros and cons for shopping locally, both personally and economically,” Rollwagen said. “I wanted to know if buying local is really worth it. This is part journalism, part personal journey — it’s not a soapbox.”
A Kansas City native and 2001 graduate of Samford University, Rollwagen has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and worked at the Birmingham Post-Herald and Southern Progress before opening Church Street Coffee and Books with Cal Morris three years ago.
“Working in journalism taught me how to communicate, how to do research, and I loved it while I did it, but after I left the Birmingham Post-Herald, I knew I wanted to do something else,” she said.
That something else turned out to be a job at Jonathan Benton Bookseller, an independent bookstore in Mountain Brook Village that closed in March 2009.
“I first had the idea for some kind of ‘shop local’ project when I was working at Jonathan Benton Bookseller, and I learned about how money stays in the community when people support local business owners,” Rollwagen said. “I was always telling my friends about the virtues of buying from local stores, but they kind of blew me off at that point because they thought I was biased because I worked at an independent store.”
Determined to get the other side of the story, Rollwagen took a job as a barista at Starbucks where she said she got better pay, better benefits and worked fewer hours.
“At that point I kind of fell off the ‘buy local’ bandwagon, and I found out that my life got a little easier. I shopped at Whole Foods and Starbucks and Chipotle and made fewer trips for the same items,” she said. “But I wondered what I was sacrificing for convenience. I knew my purchases — even the small ones — have power. I had seen both sides of the issue from my time at Jonathan Benton and from my time at Starbucks. I wanted to explore the truth in between.”
So in 2011, Rollwagen challenged herself to buy from only locally-owned stores for one year. She started a blog called Shop Small to chronicle her adventures.
“I thought it would be really hard, and I thought it would be really expensive,” she said. “But what I found is that I actually saved money because I discovered that when you are shopping locally, it really cuts down on the impulse buy factor.”
Without enticing register-side displays at big box stores to distract her, Rollwagen said she ended up saving money during her year of shopping locally and became a much more conscientious shopper.
“I realized that half the stuff I used to buy at Target I really didn’t need,” she said. “The whole thing really made me think about my purchasing power and how to best use it.”
And while she expected the whole experiment to be a bit of an ordeal, Rollwagen said she learned that supporting local, independent business owners doesn’t have to mean drastic lifestyle changes.
“It’s all about tweaking your habits instead of turning your whole life into a big sacrifice,” she said. “It’s as easy as buying your bag of Starbucks coffee at the Western rather than at Starbucks.”
Rollwagen said she thinks the best way to be a localist is to always go shopping at a local store first.
“Instead of thinking about going to a big box store first, try a local shop first and then only go to a big box when you absolutely have to,” she said.
Those kind of small shopping changes can have a big impact on the local economy, Rollwagen said.
“The statistic I keep going back to shows that for every $10 you spend at a big box store, only about $1-$3 goes back to the local economy,” she said. “But when you shop locally and spend $10, up to $7 of that can go back to the local economy. I’ve rechecked that stat many times because it’s an incredible difference.”
Rollwagen said her book also addresses online shopping, which she said robs the local economy of important tax revenue.
“So much tax revenue from online purchases should be coming back to our state, and that is not happening,” she said.
After she wrapped up her year of shopping only at Alabama-owned stores, Rollwagen said she decided to compile her blog posts into a book.
“I thought a book would be really easy to write from the blog posts, but it turned out to be more challenging than that,” she said. “The structure of the book is completely different than the blog.”
Rollwagen said she decided to self-publish the book because the book is centered in the Birmingham metro area and that the hyper-local content might not play well with traditional publishers.
“This is for our local audience, and I think people here are ready for this message,” she said.
Rollwagen launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to hire an editor and designer for her book and reached her fundraising goal of $5,000 within a month. The Kickstarter campaign wrapped up on Nov. 1 and included 179 contributors, primarily from the Birmingham metro area, Rollwagen said.
Rollwagen said she’s hoping to raise about $3,000 more to help fund a book tour.
When it came time to decide when to launch her book, Rollwagen said Small Business Saturday, or Shop Small Saturday, was a natural choice.
Small Business Saturday is a nationwide campaign aimed at increasing holiday shopping at local, independently-owned small businesses. The initiative was founded by American Express in 2010 and is sandwiched in between Black Friday and Cyber Monday in an effort to encourage shoppers to patronize brick-and-mortar businesses that are both small and local.
American Express gives its customers $10 back on purchases they make at indies on Nov. 29, up to $30.
The day after Black Friday will also be a busy day at Church Street Coffee and Books, Rollwagen said, with a reception planned at the same time as the book launch.
From 10 a.m.-noon on Nov. 29, shoppers at the bookstore and coffee shop will receive Shop Small merchandise, including canvas bags, buttons and pet kerchiefs.
Rollwagen will also have plenty of copies of “The Localist” on hand to help guide shoppers through the holiday season.
“I hope the book helps people make the connection and realize that shopping locally keeps more money circulating in our community where it can build roads, improve schools and create more jobs,” she said. “I hope people will realize the power they have to make a positive difference with the purchases they make.”
For more information, visit carrierollwagen.com/events/ or call 870-1117.
