Tag Archives: shop local

A few years ago, my dad – at my request – got me a great gift: a gift card I could use to shop in a emerging hip neighborhood of shops and restaurants in downtown Des Moines called the East Village. It was a handy way to shop local AND shop well.  Fielding a request for gift ideas for my son who is a freshman at Northwestern University, I just looked online at the City of Evanston site and found it too has a gift card that can be used for downtown shops. I’m guessing other communities have this too…so worth a look.  My Google search for “downtown gift card”  unearthed cards for downtowns all over – St. Louis, Cincinnati, State College, Pa., Long Beach, California…often this stuff is listed on website for city or local tourism or chamber office.