Today, Friday 16th of March is 'Fiver Friday', a day to support local shops and communities across Ireland. We spoke to Joe to find out where it all began.
"Fiver Friday started about ten years ago on the initiative of a listener, a small businessman, going through tough, tough, times and he said 'is there any way we could create a way and a day to around a gimmick?'
"The gimmick was, spend an extra €5 on Friday in your local shop regardless of the size of the shop. Support your local shop, they support local families.
"And that was the idea, it took off and we've been doing it ever since. Now, we hadn't one planned for this year until the 'Best from the East' rode in and Storm Emma came in behind and lots of retailers contacted us on the Monday after the snow saying, 'we have no business'.
"One shop said, 'we opened at 5.30am, as we do every morning, and we didn't get our first customer until nearly twelve hours later so the same person suggested would we have an emergency 'Fiver Friday' - a 'Beat the Beast from the East Fiver Friday'.
"Now it's on the eve of St. Patrick's Day, this coming Friday. It's all over the country. If you go on to our website www.rte.ie/fiverfriday you'll see there are offers on every single county, really fanatic offers.
"There's a buzz around towns and what is happening as well, and what the great thing about it is, various shops and stores in the one area are not competing against each other, they're coming together and saying, 'let's make the town an offering, rather than my shop and get a bit of a buzz going'.
So what offers will Joe be checking out on Friday, 16th of March?
"Every town and shopping centre have special offers. Fish & Chips, somebody said to me yesterday, in a town in Galway and a whole ten of them in Cork are normally around €14, as Fish & Chips are these days, are on for a fiver.
"There's great offers. Like if you go to Clones you can get up in the morning and have breakfast for a fiver, get your haircut for a fiver, get your nails done for a fiver, you can go and have your lunch for a fiver, you can go and have a cocktail* in a pub for a fiver, you can have your meal in the evening for a fiver and probably you'll have two pillowcases for a fiver as well so there are great offers.
"It takes one person, one shopkeeper in every area to go around to the other shops and say, 'come on, we'll do it' and hopefully, as we discovered before, various communities will engage out of it and going forward there will be a bit of a buzz because we need to shop local again, we need to go out and get away from online all the time.
"Shopping means meeting people you haven't seen for a while, it means seeing people you haven't seen in a while, it means noticing the older people in your areas, saying hello to them; 'How are you keeping? Do you need anything?'.
"It's all about community and the buzz and that's what Fiver Friday is all about."
You know what to do...let['s get shopping, locally!
