It's becoming apparent, to me at least, that our lives are getting dispersed around the globe.
What I mean is that all our daily needs and activities are becoming dependant on the resources and activities of places distant.

We take holidays abroad.
We shop online and buy stuff from far away.
We buy food that has travelled thousands of miles.
We sometimes work far from home.
We travel to meetings and stuff in different countries.
We source energy from different continents.
We export much of our waste to places foreign.

Much of this is because our local markets are no longer competitive in the global context.
So naturally we will seek lower costs for ourselves.

At some point, probably sooner rather than later, we will have to buck the trend to outsourcing all this stuff.

What can we do to improve localisation ? Does it all come down to price ?

I think it does come down to cost on alot of levels, unfortunate but that will always be the case. However, I am sure you can build a graph of price and quality and where the two meet that is where most people will shop. If the economy continues to tumble and you add into that graph a real variable of people losing their jobs, you might have a different dynamic.

I don't think it all comes down to cost, but to perception of cost and to other social factors.

I've heard a little research lately which suggests that travelling to the North to shop, unless you live relatively close to the border, is less economical than people think. If I can find some links, I'll post them up later.

Shopping in the North certainly isn't a nice experience, I wouldn't do it if you paid me. Two weekends ago I was trying to get to Belfast on completely unrelated business to shopping. I left Dublin at 6:30am in the hopes that I could get past Newry before the shoppers descended on it. I ended up sitting outside Newry for 2 hours, only to eventually drive past it and waste an awful lot of petrol in the process. Just before you got into Newry there was a place where you could turn onto the other side of the motorway and turn back to Dublin - there were plenty of takers.

EvotingMachine0197 wrote:

At some point, probably sooner rather than later, we will have to buck the trend to outsourcing all this stuff.

What can we do to improve localisation ? Does it all come down to price ?

It comes down to what people expect to be available to them. You focus on costs/economies of scale as the reason for people/companies sourcing from around the world - but noone can source everything they currently buy locally, the resources (of all kinds - materials, people, machinery) are not local to us to produce many many things. Even if you could make them available locally this would deprive other local communities of scarce resources. So reducing our consumption of globally-sourced products, foods and energy would be the only absolute way to consume more locally.

I do a lot of shopping very locally and buy from the local petrol station which is still charging a crazy price as I always factor in time, petrol and the long term desirability of having the local shop/petrol station still in business.

Ultimately, dependence on oil for shipping might force us to get much of our stuff from local sources, if no replacement is found for oil.

I'm lucky in that there are 4 petrol stations within a 1 minute drive from the house and they are currently in a price war . Filled up for 96.9 this evening.