When you shop at a locally owned business, 60 cents of your dollar goes back into the community.
When you shop at a chain store, about 20 cents stays in the area. When you shop at a discount store, only 6 cents of your dollar remains local. And when you shop online, in most cases, none of it benefits your community.
I shop locally unless I absolutely cannot find what I need...and since Keepsake Quilting is 'local' for me, that doesn't happen too often. There are many quilt shops in this area, with a huge selection of quality fabrics of every type and all of them have friendly staff, lots of 'extras', and are a pleasure to do business with. They are always eager to see what you are working on and love it when customers bring things in to show them.
The friendships, the sense of neighborliness, that all means something to this small-town soul and is worth so much more than the few pennies I would save by doing all my buying in cyberspace. Do whatever works for you, but buying local (and that goes for everything, not just quilting stuff) works best for me.