MILLHAVEN CROSSING — Derek Poulen wants you to know he is not the kind of person who just throws money at faceless corporations. He is, he will tell you, a local guy. A community guy. The kind of guy who believes the economic soul of a neighborhood lives in its small businesses, its mom-and-pop shops, its independently owned storefronts — and he will tell you all of this from a table at Groundswell Coffee, where he has been sitting since 10 a.m. ordering camping chairs, a sous vide machine, and a 36-pack of paper towels from Amazon.

"I really try to be intentional about where my dollars go," said Poulen, completing a one-click purchase of a cast-iron skillet and two varieties of specialty hot sauce, both of which are sold at a shop four blocks away. "There's a hardware store down on Clemens Street that I honestly love. Great people. I walk past it all the time."

Poulen describes himself on his personal website — hosted on a server farm in Northern Virginia — as a "hyper-local thinker" and an advocate for the "slow commerce movement," a philosophy he says he encountered in a book he purchased through a subsidiary of the company he otherwise declines to name.

"Derek is one of our best customers, in the sense that he is here every day for six hours and orders one oat milk cortado." — Simone Fareaux-Ogilvy, Groundswell Coffee shift supervisor

According to neighbors and acquaintances, Poulen's apartment contains an estimated 340 items ordered between last November and the present day, nearly all of which arrived in branded brown boxes that he has broken down and placed, with admirable civic conscientiousness, into the building's recycling bin.

Dr. Thornfield Grabb, Associate Professor of Purchasing Psychology and Regional Commerce Self-Deception at the Olen Watts Institute for Retail Studies, says Poulen's behavior reflects a widely documented phenomenon his team has termed "aspirational localism."

"The consumer holds a sincere identity around local spending," Dr. Grabb explained, "while simultaneously finding the friction of physically entering a store to be, in their words, 'a whole thing.' The values are genuine. The execution is a Prime membership."

Poulen pushed back on this characterization, noting that he did once purchase a candle from a local boutique as a birthday gift, though he acknowledged the boutique's website processed the transaction through a platform owned by a publicly traded e-commerce conglomerate.

He remains, he stressed, deeply committed to the community. He plans to attend the upcoming Millhaven Crossing Small Business Saturday event, provided the weather is agreeable and he does not have a delivery window to monitor.

The cast-iron skillet is expected to arrive Thursday.