Shopping out of town not a real savings

I overheard a comment by a Malta citizen the other day. In so many words, they were stating how they could go out of town and save money rather than shopping locally. I cannot deny that goods and services are a bit more expensive here than in the bigger towns of our state. But do you really think you are going to save money by driving out of town to do your shopping? Let’s do a little math and see what we come up with. Using Havre as an example because they have Walmart and North Forty (For-merly Shipton’s Big R).

Just for simplicities sake, let us say your vehicle gets 20 MPG average between the 180 highway miles and the 10 miles you will be driving in town. This adds up to 190 miles. 190 miles divided by 20 MPG equals 9.5 gallons of gas times $3.60 per gallon equals $34.20. Now we have to out my vehicle to what-ever company I happen to be working for and I can. tell you it amounts to $.04 per mile. $.04 times 190 miles equals $7.60. We now have a total of $41.80. We must also take into account the fact that you are going to have to eat somewhere and spend a minimum of 3 hours driving time not to mention the risk of a chipped windshield, hitting a deer or the dangers of Montana’s winter roads. But just to keep things simple we will stick to the $41.80 for fuel and vehicle costs. In my humble opinion, I do not see any real savings here. I would have to purchase well over $400 worth of goods at a 10% savings to break even. This of course does not take into consideration the fact that it will take up most of the day, that people who work hard own our local stores will lose out because of the revenue loss or the fact that by doing this we are taking away from our own community and giving it to someone else’s community.

If you want to shop out of town, go ahead. But before you start to criticize out loud for everyone to hear, you may want to be sure you know what you are talking about.

Chad Grotte

Malta, MT