Introducing Local Tier 2

For the last several days Jeff and I have been shopping locally.  Remember when I said I was going to do that?  Well, today is day four, and so far we’ve stuck to the plan, but we’re still mostly Fact Finding.  As you can imagine, there are problems with doing this.  It was part of the idea to figure out where the problems would be, and see how inconvenient shopping locally really is.

Going Out to Eat: chances are, this it isn’t a problem to find a local restaurant wherever you are.  Or delivery either.  Around here you can get local pizza and Chinese delivery, plus during the week people will actually bring you soup and casseroles.  No kidding.

Grocery Shopping:  this is more of a challenge.  Locally, I thought we’d have more choice but it turns out our options are the farmer’s market, Wheatsville Co-op, Greenling organic vegetable delivery and Grape Vine Market (which is more liquor/specialty).  I refuse to count Whole Foods, even though it started here and still has its corporate offices here.

Specialty Stores: No problem whatsoever to find coffee and tea.  We have a local gourmet tea shop (Tea Embassy) and places to purchase specialty coffee too.  Also, things like a haircut, boutique clothing, record shops (Waterloo!), all okay.  We also have a really excellent local outdoor shop with great shoes, Whole Earth Provision company.  Oh!  and Vulcan Video and the Alamo Drafthouse for movies.

Bookstores, Coffee Shops:  Austin’s fortunate enough to have a really great bookstore called BookPeople, and there are more coffee shops here than you’d think the population could support.  So, good on those fronts.  Without these things, I’d probably wither and die.  I’m a total book/coffee addict.

Crafting:  Near my house there are 2 local yarn shops and 2 bead shops.  There are also some sewing/fabric stores and even a local upholstery/interior design fabric shop.  However, if you want to do any other sort of crafts I think you might be out of luck.  Also, pretty thin on local hardware stores - all we’ve got is the small boutique-y places.

Summation on day 4:  it’s easy to get specialty items and fun stuff here, but not as easy to find the basics.  It’s going to be difficult to find basics in a lot of cases, things like normal toilet paper, new socks for running, etc.  We’re trying to decide what to do about that.

We’ve thought about instituting a “Tier 1″ and “Tier 2.”  Tier 1 would be Austin local and Tier 2 would be Texas stores so it’s still somewhat local but we could still manage to live in a functional manner when the situation called for it.

Anyway, will report again next week with what’s happened, and whether we were able to get groceries!