Our view - Community support

What makes a community?

Downtown Thermopolis, as well as all over town, has a vibrant business community with much to offer visitors and locals.

There is no more important link to the vitality of a town than its business proprietors.

Many fall prey to the ease and effective delivery of products from behemoths like Amazon, despite the full realization that the end game for its founder, Jeff Bezos, is elimination of every other business on Earth.

This begs the questions, “when all the businesses are gone, where will I work and how will I pay for my purchases?”

For this newspaper, Amazon’s success could parallel our own demise. Most of the IR’s income is derived from the advertisements with which we frame our pages every week.

It’s been a great and trusted business model for more than a century.

So please, before taking the road well-traveled with your next purchase, ask yourself, “can I buy it locally?”

If you don’t know the answer, make a few telephone or email inquiries to see if you can help sustain our local economy.

Or better yet, walk into a few local stores where you’ll most likely meet an owner or two.

These are the people who have invested their money, and their most precious and irreplaceable resource, their time, into building our thriving community.

When you desire to make a purchase, they are here for you and more importantly, they have local expertise to advise you on the product or service which will best suit your needs. If they don’t have what you are looking for, let them know your needs. They can use the information when considering merchandise purchasing in the future.

And if you have a problem with a purchase, avoid phone calls, emails and return shipping, just go in and talk to an owner or manager.

They (and we) are here to help.