Local Business Institute

04/30/2026

Just like bees keep ecosystems thriving, local shoppers keep communities alive. When you shop local this spring, you’re pollinating your economy with every purchase. Your neighborhood needs you — and your local businesses have exactly what you’re looking for.
https://localbusinessinstitute.org/live-local-pledge/

04/27/2026

Spring is the perfect time to plant seeds — including in your local economy. Every dollar you spend at a local business blooms into something bigger for your community. Pollinate your neighborhood with your spending power this season. Take the pledge to Live Local!
https://localbusinessinstitute.org/live-local-pledge/

04/24/2026

04/23/2026

Bee-hold the power of local. Your community is a living, buzzing hive — full of independent business owners and neighbors who are all in it together. When you shop local this spring, you strengthen that hive and everyone in it. Taste the sweetness of local and take the pledge!
https://localbusinessinstitute.org/live-local-pledge/

04/21/2026

In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission, then led by Joe Biden appointee Lina Khan, along with 17 states, filed an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon. The case, which is scheduled to go to trial next year, alleges that Amazon maintains a monopoly in online retail through an interlocking set of tactics—what the complaint calls “a self-reinforcing cycle of dominance”—that thwart competitors and entrench its grip on the market.

Central to Amazon’s monopoly power, the complaint alleges, are sophisticated AI-driven pricing systems that draw on torrents of real-time data and “can detect any price change virtually anywhere on the internet.”

“Amazon has used these algorithms not only to adjust its own prices in real time, but to monitor how competing retailers’ algorithms react, probe their strategies, and learn how to shape their behavior—including how to induce them to raise their prices,” writes Stacy Mitchell, co-executive director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

In the suit, the FTC singled out what it calls Amazon’s ‘anti-discounting’ algorithm, which allegedly worked by immediately matching competitors’ price changes to the penny. When a rival offered a discount, Amazon matched it; when rivals raised prices, Amazon’s algorithm followed. “This denied competing retailers a crucial tactic for luring customers from Amazon,” Mitchell continues. “If other retailers could never offer lower prices, Amazon’s roughly 200 million paying subscribers had little reason to shop elsewhere.”

More insidiously, the lawsuit contends, this strategy rewired how rivals price their products. It taught online retailers’ algorithms that price cuts yielded only thinner margins, not higher sales. Competitors’ algorithms eventually gave up on discounting and instead concluded that raising prices was a more profitable response. In turn, Amazon matched competitors’ price hikes, and prices across markets rose without any direct coordination.

“These allegations point to a novel form of monopoly power: the ability of a dominant platform to use algorithms to lift prices across an entire market,” Mitchell writes.

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/04/20/how-amazons-ai-algorithms-raise-the-prices-you-pay/

04/21/2026

Where income stops mattering for an hour

Think about what happens inside a good local shop. A teacher, a contractor, a retiree, and a college student all waiting for the same thing. Nobody's LinkedIn profile is visible. Nobody knows what anyone earns. Oldenburg called this "status leveling" — one of the things third places do that almost nothing else does. Digital spaces can't replicate it. A nice app can't replicate it. The physical room does it automatically. Do you think your business creates that kind of level ground?

Value of local business is human to human

04/21/2026

Indeed!

A couple of weeks back on a community visit, someone asked me: “Should cities adopt policies to grow population, jobs, and investment?”

Emphatically, no.

Growth for growth’s sake is a failed policy.

Not all growth is good. If I told you that you’d be better off if you gained weight, you’d have questions. Because you could gain weight by eating garbage and sitting on the couch, or you could gain it by strength training and eating well.

Same weight gain. Completely different outcomes.

Cities are no different.

Paving new roads doesn’t make your community better. Adding more national chains doesn’t make it better. Building another vinyl subdivision on the edge of town doesn’t make it better.

Those are growth strategies, not improvement strategies.

And honestly, who does sprawl expansion actually benefit? National chains and national builders. Not residents.

I’ve never seen a cheap ugly building make anyone’s life better. I’ve never seen a fast food joint make a neighborhood stronger. And I’ve never seen sprawl development make a community more self-reliant, sustainable, or resilient.

Cities should want to get better, not just bigger.

Bigger does nothing for residents. Better always does.

Every decision a city makes should be filtered through one question: Will this make our community prettier, stronger, more self-reliant?

Because your town is the sum total of its decisions. Every time you choose growth over quality, your place gets a little worse and your lives get a little sadder.

Abandon growth policies.

Adopt improvement policies.

Your town should get better, not bigger.

04/20/2026

Want to see your community thrive? Bee the change. Choosing local this spring means choosing innovation, heart, and hustle — because your local businesses are buzzing with ideas as sweet as honey. Make the shift, take the pledge, and taste the difference.
https://localbusinessinstitute.org/live-local-pledge/

04/17/2026

The best-kept secret in your community? Your local businesses. They’re creative, passionate, and absolutely the bees knees. This spring, swarm on over and discover what they have to offer. You just might find your new favorite spot. Take the Live Local Pledge today!
https://localbusinessinstitute.org/live-local-pledge/

04/14/2026

Social capital is survival
Researchers at the University of Maryland studied what helped small businesses survive COVID — and it wasn't access to capital or proximity to big lenders. The strongest predictor was social capital: the trust and reciprocity that already existed in a community before the crisis hit. That's not an abstraction. That's the customer who told three friends to order from you, the landlord who gave you a month, the neighbor who taped a sign in their window. Who in your community is part of that network for you?

Subscribe SERIES: More Than a Transaction • 1 of 5 If you’ve run a local business for any length of time, you already know that what you do reaches further than your books will ever show. You’ve watched your place become somewhere a neighborhood actually happens—where people run into each ot...