Nobody shops local anymore. It is not your fault.

You did not decide to stop going downtown. It got easier not to, a little at a time, until one day the hardware store was a vape shop and nobody could say exactly when.

Here is what actually happened.

Shopping moved onto a screen. So did the news. So did the people next door. Not because anybody wanted that — because somebody spent a great deal of money making the other thing two seconds faster.

The part most people have never been told.

When you spend a hundred dollars at a shop owned by somebody who lives here, a large share of it stays here — she pays her kid's coach, her plumber, the woman who does her books. The same hundred does several jobs before it leaves town.

Spend it with a company headquartered somewhere else and it does one job, then it is gone. That is the whole argument, and it is not sentimental. It is arithmetic.

So we built the thing that was missing.

The boring, necessary stuff a small business cannot afford to buy piece by piece: a real website, a way to take payment, a way to put on an event, a way to write an estimate and get it signed.

Nine dollars a month to start. We take nothing out of your sales, and if you leave, your customers leave with you.

And it only works if you actually go.

We can put the whole town on a map. We cannot make anybody walk out the door. That part was always yours.