Buffalo Rising Online

What?!?!?! They opened a Ritas!!! Whenever I am in New Jersey I always stop at a Rita's for a custard and water ice. These are waaaay better than anything Cold Stone has to offer.

Anderson's is not only better, it's a homegrown company!

I'm all about local, and my favorite local ice cream place (the Lexington General store) buys local stuff and is good and cheap.

That being said, having lived in Philly, I love me some water ice, and Rita's does it right (although I think they call it something that makes more sense in other markets). It's worth getting now and then.

As for Cold Stone? It's just a gimmick to make ice cream expensive. You won't catch me there.

While I agree that we should buy local whenever we can, this is a local franchisee who opened this location - so it's not all bad - it could be a corporate location.

Buy local. These companies like Rita's and Cold Stone send a lot of their profits back to the home office, far far away. Most likely many of their supplies are shipped in from outside the area. Buy locally owned and the profits stay in town, and can ripple through the local economy. Local stores are more likely to buy from local suppliers, helping the local economy, and reducing the ecological footprint.

All you "buy local" people had better be asking all of your out-of-town friends to boycott all Buffalo-owned companies who try to do any business in those places, or else you're being very inconsistent. And if you know any executives in companies outside of Buffalo, beg them to refuse to ever select any Buffalo suppliers or service providers.

In your ideal world:

- Spot Coffee, Wegmans, and Tops would pack up and leave Buffalo after all their customers here switched over to Buffalo-owned alternatives.

- Buffalo-owned Wilson Farms would stay here and fill the gap of Wegmans and Tops being gone.

- Buffalo Rising would not have expanded its Buffalo work force to provide web sites for Toronto and Brooklyn, since customers there would choose not to do buisines with a Buffalo-owned company. (Or maybe that really happened. D-ohhh!)

- All the people at Rich Products buildings on Niagara St would lose their jobs except for the handful who would be needed to sell products to the Buffalo market.

- All the people at M&T Bank downtown would lose thier jobs except for the handful who would be needed to service Buffalo account holders and borrowers.

- All the people at New Era Cap downtown would lose thier jobs except for the handful needed to make caps to be worn by Buffalo cap-wearers.

- And so on, thousands of other impacts. Nice.

Buy local my ass. Buy the best product. It is not a crime to go to Starbucks if that's the best coffee in your neighborhood.

Yeah, I've been a little surprised there's not more backlash against the "buy local" propaganda that seems pushed often lately.

Obviously many people do strongly disagree with it, based on customer flow to businesses such as Starbucks, Spot, Wegmans, Target, etc., but when the "buy local" crowd pushes their harmful agenda people just seem to give them polite agreement for some reason.

Everbody whose job (or family members' jobs, or tenants' jobs, etc.) depends on customers not in Buffalo should push back against "buy local" brain washing attempts and advocate a "buy best" approach as Ruby puts it well.

It always struck me as really bizarre for Buffalo Rising to push "buy local" (not in this Rita's article obviously, but in others) while at the same they themselves as a Buffalo corporation were quite naturally seeking to expand thier own customer base to other cities. Or maybe Toronto and Brooklyn don't have their own local web site companies. Right.

The whole buy local thing works to promote your personal economies. But at the core of any economy you need Base Industries. Those are industries that export their services, goods etc to other regions and bring outside capital here. The real economic winners are those areas where the base industries bring in more wealth than the region bleeds away to non-local industries. You can never buy everything you need from local industries but the idea of buying locally is to keep that wealth we bring in here as long as possible. The longer it stays the richer we all become.

The truth is if other places pushed more for local products also it could hurt our base industries but the problem economically with Buffalo is we lost more base industries than most cities and we haven't been able to attract or grow new one which means buying local for us is more important than in NYC or bigger markets which have further reach in global market shares. Capitalism is a greedy parasite. To grow a strong economy we should buy locally and sell to far markets...

Also when the base industries left buffalo many local businesses that relied on their wealth generation failed as well. The local pubs, restaurants, grocers etc... leaving a void that national chains filled. So in the end in a place like buffalo we need to support local places as much as possible because we are bleeding what little wealth we generate.

LOL...by local??????????????????? So you people are constantly compaining about having more retail in Buffalo, " MORE RETAIL DOWNTOWN" blah blah blah, sounds like a broken record now. Who do you think the retail would be if they did open? Local? Please, make up your minds...

complaining...sorry

on a side note. Rita's is a franchise, so it is locally owned I would assume, with local employee's...so like every single local store the product is bought elsewhere, but the profit stays here. Kind of a "no brainer" yes?