Two motives, and there is no third one. Send money to businesses owned by people who live here. And make plain decency something a place can put in its window. That’s it. That’s the whole idea.
Free directory, no ads, nobody can pay to be on it, nothing sold to anyone. Fair enough if your first thought is so where’s the catch. Everything online eventually wants your money or your data, and usually both.
The honest answer is duller than a catch. This costs a few dollars a month and some evenings. I’d rather spend that than keep being annoyed about the county I live in, and I don’t want anything back that would change what the list means.
Spend at a neighbor’s place and most of it comes straight back out as wages, rent and suppliers within a few miles of you. Spend the same at a chain and the profit leaves the county that night. Nobody needs a campaign to find the chains. The place two streets over that you’d have driven past forever — that’s who this is for.
Most people here are good to each other. It just isn’t written down anywhere, so somebody who’s been treated badly before has no way to know which door is safe to walk through. The promise is simply that: an owner saying, in their own window, that everyone gets treated well here and that they’ll step in if somebody else doesn’t.
It isn’t a political badge and it isn’t an inspection. It costs nothing and it asks for nothing but behaving decently, which most of these owners were doing already.
If any of that ever changes, the page about who pays changes first, before anything else does.
Shop local. Be good to people. Nothing here is cleverer than that.
— Anthony Aragues, who lives here. AnthonyAragues.com