In today’s world of talking (and screaming) heads, it’s pretty easy to feel pretty hopeless. Many American consumers feel that the world, national, and local economies are free-falling, completely out of control. Despite these feelings of helplessness, we as consumers can impact our economy, even here in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

There are ways that individual consumers can, and should, make a change. Budget problems, cuts, and other government decisions are largely out of our control, but this doesn’t mean that we can’t work to have a positive impact on our daily lives. We can do this through supporting our local economies.

So why should consumers care about helping the local economy? Here are a few reasons why:

• It’s Our Economy: When we spend money at big business stores and they turn a profit, they generally seek to expand. Yet that doesn’t guarantee they’ll reinvest that money and expand here in Albuquerque. They can take that money and those expansion plans and open up a store somewhere else, with our money. A small, local business expands their store here, hires employees here and reinvests their money here.

• We Have a Voice: By buying local, we are using our voices to have a say in Albuquerque’s economy. The voice we use is money. When we spend our hard earned money locally, we can have an impact on our day-to-day lives. We’re saying that we support the local economy, and not bigger business that may or may not have a small, local economy’s interests at heart. By doing so, we are doing our part to keep our local economies going and to pull ourselves out of the current economic downturn.

• It’s Tough But Somebody Has To Do It: We know how easy it is to walk into a chain store because they’re everywhere and they advertise the lowest prices around. But this modern mentality of ease and laissez faire (the idea of live and let live) won’t help us fix the economy. When we start breaking old habits, and making that push for our money to get reinvested in our own communities, we take that first step on the road to putting people back to work and creating economic growth-- not only in our communities, but nationwide.

In these tough times, it seems impossible to make any sort of positive effect on the economy. Rather than worry and panic about the larger economy, which we can’t directly impact on a daily basis, we can make changes locally. We need to start small by making changes in our day-to-day lives to begin building a brighter economic tomorrow.