January 11 , 2005

Businesses Have Obligation to Give Back to the Community

At The Chamber’s Annual Meeting in February, six Blair County businesses will be honored for their continued support of the local community. These “Loyalty Award” recipients join more than two dozen recognized in previous years for reaching significant milestones of Chamber membership.

While all six of the newest honorees deserve special consideration, one in particular stands-out for bucking a disturbing trend. The J.C. Penney Company, marking sixty-five consecutive years as a Chamber member, finds itself among a dwindling group of national retailers continuing to hold Chamber membership.

Bill Crouse, General Manager of the Penney’s store in Altoona’s Logan Valley Mall, refused to speculate as to why other retailers might choose to disdain the local business community. He preferred instead to explain Penney’s ongoing commitment.

“It actually goes back to our heritage,” Crouse pointed out. “Penney’s has always felt that we needed to be involved in the communities in which our stores were located. We’ve always believed that community involvement goes well beyond dollars and cents. It’s about giving back.”

Giving back.

It makes perfect sense that the economic vibrancy of a community would ebb and flow based on the willingness of its businesses to return some measure of the bounty that they are only too willing to routinely extract. At this point, however, the scale is tilting dramatically in the wrong direction for a county like Blair which fashions itself as a future retail Mecca. Especially when you consider the size and strength of the non-participating businesses.

For every J.C Penney feeling an obligation to give back, there are unfortunately three retailers of similar size that are content to suck money out of Blair County and dispatch it to corporate coffers, often in distance parts of the country. The locally economy be damned. And don’t think for one minute I’m referring to Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club or Target. Despite all the criticism that these corporate giants receive for making life difficult for small businesses, they are among the most active in the Chamber and the most willing to fund community-based projects, particularly those benefiting children.

In fairness, some of the local retailers that don’t participate admit that their hands are tied by their corporate offices. While that may seem like a convenient excuse, it would seem to have some validity, based on a recent survey by the American Chamber of Commerce Executives (ACCE). That national organization of Chambers has recently created an initiative called “Operation: Open Door.” Its goal is to target big-box retailers and chain stores to help “remove the impediment or prohibition to joining chambers of commerce imposed by corporate policy.”

As you can probably tell, the issue of businesses “giving back” has become a hot-button item for me. Beyond the personal conviction that all businesses should support the economic well-being of the community in which they reside, it infuriates me to think about the small business with two employees helping to fund an effort that will ultimately have greater benefit to the large business that invests nothing.

It’s not fair. And it needs to change.

So beginning later this month, as ACCE begins knocking on the doors of the nation’s top retail CEO’s, I will be scheduling appointments with local general managers to plead the case of those 920 businesses that see the value of giving back.

I will let you know how it goes.

DecemberNotes