Written by Christopher Mitchell, the director of the Telecommunications as Commons Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Minneapolis.

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Thanks to Shift Your Shopping and a number of other national and local initiatives aimed at raising consumer awareness to shop at independent retailers, those surveyed by national nonprofit Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) outperformed the industry, reporting an average increase in holiday sales of 6.7% in 2011.

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