Do Americans Across Communities Prefer Amazon Prime to Local Business Shopping?

Americans are expected to spend about $1,000 each on holiday gifts this season, according to Gallup, and where they spend that money will have a big impact on communities across the country.

As online shopping increases, small businesses have made a point of asking consumers to “shop local,” emphasizing that local businesses are owned by consumers’ friends and neighbors, and dollars spent there are more likely to have a positive impact on the community.

However, consumer research from MRI-Simmons suggests that messaging is having a limited impact on consumers. That data, broken into the American Communities Project’s 15 county types, shows enthusiasm for shopping locally is tepid at best. Instead, the big winner seems to be Amazon, the massive, national online shopping platform, according to the MRI-Simmons data.

The 15 community types in the American Communities Project are different in a variety of ways when it comes to consumer experiences. The distance to the nearest store, local shopping options, and general product availability are radically different in the dense Big Cities and upscale Urban Suburbs than they are in the sparsely populated Aging Farmlands or small-town Rural Middle America communities.

Yet there seems to be much agreement in the data on local shopping and Amazon.com’s Prime membership.

Local Versus Prime

The first thing that jumps out of the MRI-Simmons data is how uniform it is. Again, considering the differences in the ACP types, one might expect more variation. After all, local business owners are always more likely to be “your friends and neighbors” than the owners of national chains. That is especially true in small towns where fewer degrees of separation exist between locals.

But the survey statement “I prefer shopping at local, independent stores to shopping at national store chains,” shows little difference in the community types.

No community type is below 49% on that statement and no community type is above 53%. That’s a level of agreement the ACP seldom sees, especially on something that can be so tied to a person’s geography.

Some of those numbers might be explained by availability — the stores and products one can find in, say, the Aging Farmlands might dissuade people from shopping locally. But, again, the statement says “prefer.” When considering the close connections in small communities, the relatively low number is still a surprise. It also may be that the numbers in communities like the Big Cities are higher than expected because residents value shopping locally to feel more connected to community in a big urban environment.

Regardless, the largely even numbers across the board are somewhat unexpected.

The figures for Prime memberships show a little more variation, but not as much as one might think considering that Prime is not free. A membership costs $139 a year.

Overall, the Prime numbers do track communities' socioeconomic and cultural differences. For instance, the Urban Suburbs and Exurbs, which have the highest Prime membership numbers, also have the highest median household incomes of all the 15 types. So, Prime’s cost is likely less of an issue for people who live there. And while the membership fee may matter more to people who live in the Native American Lands, Aging Farmlands, and Evangelical Hubs, where incomes are lower, there are also generally fewer shopping options in those places.

Still, the takeaway from the data is that Amazon has a firm grip on the current US consumer experience. There was a time when paying for special conveniences in shopping might have been seen as something reserved for the upper-middle-class and above. These data suggest that is no longer true — or that Amazon has found the right price point for it.

Furthermore, despite a lot of talk of helping small businesses and frustration about empty storefronts, the appetite for shopping locally seems to be limited, even across the varied lived experiences of the ACP.

How Much Do Shared Values Matter?

In a broader sense, those numbers stand in opposition to other findings the ACP has seen in its survey work. For example, the ACP/Ipsos 2023 survey found that residents in every community tended to place more trust in local institutions than national ones. And business was a prime example in every community type.
Far more people said “small or local business” was more likely to share their values than “big business.” (The Aging Farmlands and Native Americans Lands were not included on the small business question due to the time constraints on polling in those places, but other rural communities followed the same pattern.)

How can all these somewhat contradictory numbers be true? Well, first and most important, these results come from different surveys, so different samples and/or methods could have an impact here.

It’s also possible that people in all the ACP community types do feel that local businesses are more likely to share their values, but other issues, such as cost, production selection, and/or convenience, take precedence when making purchasing decisions.

That seems to be a lesson in a lot of big stories this year, including the presidential race, where many voters cast ballots for President-elect Donald Trump, even while expressing reservations about doing so. The reason most people cited for their choice? The economy, particularly inflation.

In other words, values clearly matter to people, but sometimes other concerns may take precedence in the United States in 2024.