Shop the Neighbourhood

 As if Black Friday and Cyber Monday aren't enough, Shop the Neighbourhood is coming over to Ottawa to serve as a buffer between the two and encourage people to shop - local this time round.

Just a quick round-up of what it is, Shop the Neighbourhood is an initiative started by Yellow Media Ltd. (a.k.a. Yellow Pages) to support local businesses in Canada. On the day of the event, participating local businesses have exclusive deals to encourage residents to drop by and discover what their neighbourhood has to offer! The program launched November last year in Toronto, and this year, they extended the program to Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal and Ottawa.
Update: Over 8000 businesses nationwide participated in the event! Woop woop! Let's shop local more often!

You can check out a little more about the initiative here - and a bit of shameless self-promotion here, I wrote about it for a local community paper that you can check out here! 

  That being said, I definitely checked it out and man, I never realized just how much of a deal they were going to make out of it! ByWard Market definitely went all out (granted, most of the stores there did participate in the event) and there were yellow balloons, banners, people walking around with yellow shopping bags and scarves pretty much everywhere I looked.

I definitely took advantage and popped into a few shops here and there, even ones I had never heard of before. And man, there are quite a lot of them. I love the concept of events like this, and I think these need to happen more often! Shopping local is a great way to not only support small-medium sized businesses but it also offers you a great chance to see what is readily available to you a few steps out from your home. Plus, it's an awesome opportunity for anyone to explore their neighbourhood more!

I'm all for seeing what else stores along Bank Street and ByWard Market have to offer!

Do you shop local often?

Happy discovering!