Finishing up holiday shopping in Centre County? Merry Millheim features sales, events
Small businesses have been competing with e-commerce companies for years, but this year, buying local could be what keeps a family-owned storefront from closing forever.
“Buy local,” Centre County Commissioner Mark Higgins said. “When you buy from Amazon.com, only one penny of your dollar stays local. If you shop at a physical location, a chain store, 43 cents of your dollar stays local. The average small business keeps 68 cents of your dollar local. When you buy a locally produced product or service, almost all of the purchase price stays local.”
Higgins was in State College and Bellefonte for Small Business Saturday, visiting shops and restaurants. And this weekend, he’s is headed to Penns Valley for “Merry Millheim” — a three-day event geared toward supporting businesses and celebrating the holiday season.
“Millheim is about as small a town as you can get, and yet, you can still have a fun time for hours,” he said, listing every business in the borough and outliers. “There’s a fabulous pub and restaurant. There’s a nice new wine place, a meat market. You have a delightful coffee shop. I mean, who else has a canoe bolted to their ceiling?”
Boasting a 50% off sale at Penns Valley Jewelers and Cottage Rose Interiors, owners Sara Postlethwaite and Richard Winebold are hoping for a large turnout this weekend.
“We were closed for almost two months, so we were worried, of course,” Postlethwaite said. “In the meantime, Richard got caught up cleaning and repairing unique clocks and watches and repairing all the jewelry we had backed up.”
When the shop reopened, Postlethwaite said they were “instantly busy” and hope that trend continues during the holiday season. “Lucky to be small-town jewelers,” the pair said people continue to buy from them, and they keep their money local.
“As owners of a business, we spend almost all our money in this community, so it is a delicious system of shared resources,” Postlethwaite and Winebold said in an email. “Buy a diamond engagement ring from us and be assured that money will go right back to Hosterman and Stover’s Hardware, or Burkholder’s Market or some other local business.”
Merry Millheim will kick off with a Christmas art show at Green Drake Gallery from 1-7 p.m. Friday. Concerts, wine tastings, raffles and other special events and sales are scheduled for the Inglebean Coffee House, Elk Creek Cafe + Alehouse, Pisano Winery, Burkholder’s Country Market and more.
A complete schedule of events can be found on the Merry Millheim Facebook page, which includes information about the celebration as well as COVID-19 safety protocols.
With the holidays approaching, the next 14 days are going to determine how many small businesses are going to survive the pandemic, Higgins said, adding that the future of downtown shops and storefronts are in the hands of Centre County consumers.
“Are we going to make Jeff Bezos richer than he already is, or are we going to save our local businesses?” Higgins asked. “Amazon doesn’t do what your local businesses do. If we don’t support them strongly over the next two weeks, they will be gone, and they’ll be gone forever. Once you lose a downtown, they don’t come back.”
