The cutline on last Monday’s Page 1 News-Banner is what caught my eye right away.
“Cutline” is a bit of journalism jargon that you only hear around a newsroom. It’s a fancy word for a caption — the words that we write under a picture in the newspaper to explain what’s happening in the image that the photographer captured.
The cutline’s first two words were the ones that caught my attention: Shopping local.
Those two words were in boldface type next to an image that my colleague Holly Gaskill took March 2 at the Small Town Formal Event Expo that was held at the Wells County Chamber of Commerce and Visitors Centre.
Shopping local.
It’s a charge that we try to promote as often as possible to support the businesses in and around Wells County that in turn pour so much back into our community.
My dentist, eye doctor, physician and barber are in Bluffton. When I need my lawnmower and snowblower serviced, I head to Bluffton’s north side to drop them off.
Up until Masterson’s closed several years ago, all of my sport coats, suits, dress shirts and ties came from there thanks to Dick Mayer’s uncanny ability to always help me pick out the best shirt-tie combo. I do my banking in Bluffton. The list could go on and on.
One of the many benefits of shopping local is how personalized the customer care always is — a fact that I was reminded of these past two weeks as my wife and I shopped for a new chair.
We started our search outside of town, as it was late on a Saturday afternoon and the only stores that were still open were located in our neighboring city to the north.
My wife has to have surgery this spring that we were not expecting; she’ll need a power reclining chair for several weeks as she recovers from the procedure since lying down in a bed won’t be possible.
We haven’t quite reached that stage in our lives where we need a power recliner to help us sit back and relax and then get up. After sitting in several of these power recliners earlier this month, however, I think I have fast-forwarded to the stage of life where I like this luxury.
Our 110-pound golden retriever is petrified of the chair, but I’ll save that story for another day.
We found the chair we liked but soon discovered that neither store we visited had it in stock. One store said it might be in within a month but that the business could not guarantee anything; the second store said it would likely be much longer but might be able to sell us the model off the floor.
A week later and after several promises to call me back that always ended up with me calling the store back, we still didn’t have a chair for Jen’s impending surgery.
By this point, we knew what we should have done all along but didn’t — shop in Bluffton, which is of course where my family has shopped for furniture since long before I was born.
We found the same chair we had picked out at the other stores, and the employees were glad to sell it to us off the floor. To say we appreciated their kindness and courtesy is an understatement.
Shopping local. You can’t beat it.
Our sense of urgency to get a chair quickly on a Saturday afternoon due to Jen’s upcoming surgery ended up causing us way more problems than had we just waited to shop local.
Lesson learned.
You won’t see us shopping for furniture anywhere else but on Bluffton’s north side. And we may be in the market for another one of those power recliners much sooner than I expected for only being in my early 40s.
jdpeeper2@hotmail.com
