When Did Shop Local Become In Principle Only ?

This sentiment isn’t only a matter of opinion. Recent numbers underscore the reality: U.S. retail e-commerce sales jumped nearly 10% year-over-year to $326.7 billion in early 2026*, while more than half of small businesses expect lower-than-usual revenue. This disconnect between public support and actual purchasing has never been more obvious. It also comes from my own experience as a small business owner and from other small business owners I’ve spoken to—home and abroad.

Companies like Amazon, Temu, TikTok Shop, and Shein have economies of scale, enabling them to offer consumers unbeatable prices and products that can’t be matched locally. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone because they’re designed to be that way: to undercut the small business owner and, eventually, drive them to extinction. It’s their business model, and it’s working.

Sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it isn’t. I have heard it said to me on more than one occasion: “You charge HOW much?! That’s crazy, I can get that on Amazon for half the price!” And then they buy it on Amazon, Temu, or TikTok for half the price. I wish I were making this up. It’s a familiar phrase echoing in small shops and businesses across the globe. Ask a small business owner in your community whether their business is thriving since Amazon became a global superpower.

It’s economically impossible, unless you were well off to begin with, for a solo business owner—or even a business with fewer than, say, 5-10 employees—to compete with larger corporations. The cost differences in purchasing, producing, or both, for what your business needs to function daily are too wide compared with the millions, if not billions, of dollars those companies make. Often, this forces independent business owners to take drastic measures to curry favor with potential clients and customers and keep the ones they already have, even at the expense of their own livelihood.

I’ve also been a small business owner for over 15 years and have continually had to restructure my business practices because I cannot compete with Amazon or the multitude of social media influencers peddling products related to my type of business to their own TikTok Shops, where they get a pittance in return—a well-known influencer recently disclosed his TikTok stats from the last 28 days, in which he had over 15.4 million views on his content and made $24. Again, I say: pittance.

This is all starting to sound “ranty,” I know, but it’s a very real frustration that has me questioning every day whether or not it makes fiscal sense to keep my business operating, even when I’ve adopted online ordering options, pickup, and delivery. Too often I’ve reduced my pricing in an effort to satisfy my clientele, often, taking monthly losses. And I know I’m not the only one. All across the board, I’ve had small shop owners and independent business owners confide in me about how they just don’t know what to do anymore. We are all worried.

Yes, inflation is very real, and I too am impacted by hard times. But the statistics suggest the Shop Local movement is facing a real behavior gap: people may support local businesses in principle, but rising e-commerce and softer small business revenue show that goodwill is not automatically turning into sales.

Maybe the reason Shop Local feels hollow now is because the world has changed, but the movement hasn’t adapted to the realities of how people actually live and shop. The same people who mourn the loss of local businesses are often the ones who have quietly shifted their own habits; choosing convenience and cheaper prices online, even as they claim to value strength of community and local economic growth. Until our buying habits match our values, good intentions alone won’t be enough to keep the doors open. Now, it just feels like another passing trend. Come and gone…and you’ll probably just buy it on Amazon.