When I said buy local I was specifically talking about food and similar. Depending on few factors such as: climate, availability of land, other people with similar goals, food can be easy to produce either as a group or individual basis and there are systems looking at an aquaponics cycle for example tilapia -> leafy greens -> BSF maggots -> you can either split this into chickens and tilapia or just back into tilapia (we’ve done this it really requires a group effort and land availability).

Other things as you’ve mentioned like furniture can be a little more challenging due to economies of scale (also child labour, corruption, and general shittery) that major corporations are able to exploit that a local tradesperson can’t.

For this sort of stuff I just try to budget, I never buy it immediately.

I guess it’s about compromises, and unfortunately for certain things we have to do so.

To reiterate the importance of a group, it’s really made it a lot easier to cut costs by having a group with various expertise.