This post was originally published on On Deck
When people shop locally, small business owners and their families and employees benefit from the revenue and the satisfaction of building meaningful relationships in their community. And around $68 out of every $100 stays local, compared to $43 when shopping at a national chain.
The U.S. Small Business Association (SBA) celebrates and encourages this dynamic through initiatives such as Small Business Saturday, National Small Business Week (May 3-9, 2026) and the Season of Small Business at the end of the year.
But customers and business owners alike utilize social media to keep enthusiasm thriving all year round. The passion and principle behind shopping local is seen in Instagram posts with tags like #ShopLocal[city name]. And as we discovered in our new study, some cities and states have hundreds of thousands of Instagram posts following this format with their name.
So, to identify the American places with the greatest #ShopLocal spirit, business lender OnDeck identified the number of posts tagged #ShopLocal/#ShopSmall[city name] for nearly 500 major cities and calculated the density of these posts per local 100,000 population for each city and state.
What we did
We calculated the combined total count of Instagram posts tagged with #shoplocal[city name] or #shopsmall[city
— Read the rest of this post, which was originally published on On Deck.
