Buy Local Bowling Green has promoted independently-owned, locally-run businesses in and around Bowling Green, Kentucky since 2010. We do four things, and we’ve done all four since the beginning.
We promote local businesses, every day. Across our website, Instagram, and Facebook — a combined audience of more than 30,000 across BG and Southern Kentucky — we feature local businesses worth your time and your dollar. Every business we cover is independently owned and operated. No chains. No franchises. No national rollups dressed to look local.
We publish in print, twice a year. The Buy Local Bowling Green Magazine comes out in a Spring/Summer issue and a Holiday issue — a real, printed, hold-it-in-your-hands guide to where to eat, shop, play, and live local in Southern Kentucky. It’s the kind of regional guide every town used to have and almost none still do.
We run Buy Local Month. Every year from November 15 through December 15, we lead a community-wide push to keep holiday spending in Bowling Green. It’s the most consequential month on the local retail calendar, and it’s the month where the math behind buying local hits hardest.
And we help local businesses run better. Through Buy Local Payments, our merchant services partner, we help small businesses lower their card processing costs and keep more of every dollar that comes through the register. Across our active roster, that’s totaled more than $382,000 a year in lower processing costs versus our major competitor— real money, returned to real Bowling Green businesses. We also handle social media content management for merchants who’d rather run their business than write captions.
The math underneath all of this is simple. A dollar spent at an independent local business stays in the community several times over before it leaves. A dollar spent at a national chain is on a plane to corporate by Friday. That difference, repeated across a community our size for fifteen years, is what we mean by Buy Local.
We’re not a nonprofit. We’re not a chamber. We’re a small, independently-operated company that bet in 2010 on the idea that Bowling Green deserves a real local-first publisher and a real local-first merchant services partner.
Still here. Still local. Still independent.
Get in touch: BuyLocalBG@gmail.com
Follow along: @BuyLocalBG on Instagram and Facebook
Print advertising: Spring/Summer and Holiday issue rates available on request
For business owners: Ask about a free statement audit. We’ll show you exactly what you’re paying and what you’d save before you sign anything.