As a consumer, the best way is to buy on line.

If you have a great little local bead store that offers a nice environment, great service and beads, it may not be there for long if you buy on line. If you want it to thrive, grow, and be there for years of enjoyment, you have to spend your money there. If you don’t, it won’t have great prices, it wont have a great selection, it can’t offer great classes and it will close.

Providing a beads store is a very expensive venture. It is even harder if the beads store’s wholesaler is competing with them for their customers. What does this mean? A bead store buys its product from a company that stocks lots of beads to sell in large quantity at lower prices to bead stores. This place, in general terms, is called a wholesaler. The beads store sells the product at smaller quantities to consumers at slightly higher prices. This higher price buys you, the customer, a nice store to shop in and it pays the salaries of the people who own the store and work there. The wholesaler has a warehouse and does not offer great classes and a great place to shop and congregate. Most likely the wholesaler does not pay tax in your town and does not support your town with jobs for the people who live there.

What has happened is that the large “wholesalers” and catalog stores with the help of the internet have decided to sell directly to their retailer’s customers bypassing the retailers (local beads stores). Yes, you may get a better price for a few beads, but you and your community lose in every other way. When you want to take a bead class or see some beads in person or get some personal help, the wholesaler will not be there for you and there will be no store in your town either. When you want a summer job for yourself or your children, that local store will not be there. When there are only big box retailers and alot of empty store fronts in your town, the wholesaler will not be there for you.

Places who have great beads stores support these stores. The only way to have a great store store is to support it. Don’t buy from on line retailers, buy at your local beads store or from a local beads store like The Beadcage. If your local store does not have what you need, have them get it and then buy it. It may be a bit more expensive, but in time prices will come down. Take classes at the store. Teach at the store. Tell friends about the store. Spend time posting positive constructive comments about your store on blogs and rating services on line so others will know about it. Don’t bad mouth a local store, work with them constructively to help them improve.

Remember having a lemonade stand as a child and watching cars go by and no one stops? As a child it is a pretty bad feeling. This is the same feeling a bead store has when people drive by and buy from an on line “wholesaler”.