Bling

photo credit: Peter Rivera

Every day we hear more and more about shopping locally.  Whether it’s for environmental reasons or simply to help out people in your community during rough economic times, it is something that people are thinking about.

Now, there are even payment methods that support the shop local community minded concept.  The method that I recently read about is called Bling Nation.  The idea is to provide all of your customers with RFID tags that attach to their mobile phones.  Then when they shop at the associated merchants that can simply swipe their phone and walk out with the product.  One of their current pitches is to community groups.  The community group sets up the service with multiple local businesses.  This provides the local customers with an easy way to shop at the local businesses while the big out-of-town businesses in the area don’t have this perk.  The hope would be that people would value the service enough to mostly shop local.

Here’s a good article that Forbes did about this service: Leave the Credit Card, Take the Cell Phone

What do you think?  Will this actually encourage people to shop locally??

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Tagged as: BlingNation, Cell, Forbes, Local, Mobile, Payment