Locally made. Locally owned. Is it really?

[TheMadMonk]

Had this thought walking home tonight. Don't know if it's been considered before.

I was thinking about the difficulty I had earlier in the day purchasing a packet of tobacco. Within 100 metres of my front gate, there is both a pub/hotel/saloon and a kebab shop/milkbar. The one has a cigarette machine, the other averqages approximately three dozen packets ranged across perhaps six popular brands of tailor made cigarettes. Neither carries rolling tobacco of any variety. Not even the rough as guts prison dark.

Please anti-smoking campaigners, leave your particular predjudice at the door. I mention tobacco, only as the trigger product for this musing.

All of us (of a certain age) have watched as the availability of many common, high demand (and indeed essential) products has been increasingly consolidated into increasingly larger centralised complexes. Essentially the last bastion of the corner store, is take-away plus a few ultra-high demand products (convenience: eg. carbonated drinks, crisps; occasional: Whitegoods, etc and essential: eg. milk, sugar bread) with a little leeway proportional to the distance from one of the centres of consolidation in the case of essentials and concentraton (eg. town centre vs. mall) for occasionals.

O.K. hopefully that's set the stage, vis a vis the arena withing which we as consumers are constrained to opperate.


My question concerns the players within the arena.

Many of us are careful to choose our purchases with an eye towards claims of local manufacture and local ownership of a product manufacturer. We even give some thought to whether the ownership of a local manufacturer is local or foreign.

But, just how sure can we be that we're really doing what we think we're doing, when we read the labels? There are all sorts of logo programs to indicate local manufature or ownership, some with quite stringent rules and definitions of what actually contitutes local manufature or ownership.

But how much consideration is given, within these rules, or when we personally make our choice, as to the way ownership may nest?

Can a subsidiary to a foreign owned corporation that is incorporated within a particular country, claim to be locally owned within that same country?

Do any of the "Local Ownership Programs" specifically prohibit this kind of finessing of reality?

Do WE think about who owns/controls the company which owns/controls the locally incorporated company, localy marketing, or manufacturing a particular product?



Sudden brainfart.

My understanding is that all of these "consume local" programs rely on a lexical rather than mathematical description.

Ultimately, it seems to me, that one single meta-criterion matters:
How much of a given product's asking price, avoidably passes beyond the borders of a country/region/town's ecconomic influence?

How close to home does your money stay?

Is it possible to devise a ranking system, that encompasses both the practicality of production (ie. a town of 500 can not resonably be expected to wholely produce a "local automobile") AND the ultimate destination of our hard earned dollar? And further, do so in such a way, that value can't be subtracted (as opposed to the concept of value added) through artificial edifices of ownership?

Finally if such a system cam be practically devised, would it be reasonable to give that system the force of law and enact penalties for false claims under that system?