The Wagga Business Chamber has expressed interest in adopting a local shopping gift card system to empower bricks and mortar businesses in the city.
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It comes after a suggestion from Baylis Street business owners Rob Illsley and Joshua Brame to promote a ‘buy local’ campaign with tools such as Wagga-only spending cards and partnerships.
The local gift card initiative is one aspect of the preexisting Why Leave Town initiative founded in Narrabri more than decade ago to encourage residents of rural communities to actively support their local businesses.
Why Leave Town owner Ashley Watt said the gift cards could be used as a “community building tool” for Wagga.
“Smaller regional towns and centres typically have a strong sense of community and will look after local businesses. Using gift cards that can only be spent in local stores could be one way to bring a community even closer together,” he said.
Under the scheme, participating local stores could take EFTPOS purchases from a ‘loaded’ gift card and even act as providers or retailers for the card in question.
Mr Watt said more than $1.4 million had been generated for participating communities through the gift card program since 2007.
Smaller Riverina towns such as Temora have already adopted the scheme with variety of businesses from cafes and clothing stores accepting ‘Temora Card’ credit.
Temora mayor and business owner Rick Firman has previously shared his enthusiasm for the scheme, labelling the card system a “tremendous way of promoting business”.
Wagga Business Chamber president Danielle Pascoe said she could not recall a local gift card scheme being pitched to Wagga City Council or the business chamber during her four years in office but expressed a keen interest.
“That’s certainly something that we would be open to working towards and I can see how such an initiative would add value to the community. We’d be more than happy to pitch that to council.”
Wagga City Council mayor Greg Conkey recalled an earlier system of local reward cards operating in the Riverina and said he would be happy to support new initiatives that promote trade.
“We’d certainly be open to hearing anything that benefits the local providers.”
Ms Pascoe agreed, stating the system “aligned” with the Chamber’s mantra of promoting local business.