Small Businesses Fill Vital Need
Recently, I was able to attend a conference where the main focus was on helping small businesses. With all the talk about what these businesses need, there are two things that everyone seems to agree on: small businesses are absolutely essential the economy, and small businesses are extremely difficult to maintain successfully, especially in the current economy.
I was in middle school when I first started to notice a big “shop local” contingent in my hometown. A lot of small businesses — some of which had been operating since the early days of the Reconstruction — were banding together against the local mall and big box stores, which they felt were infringing on their ability to do business. Cheaper prices and flashier ad campaigns had caused a lot of local shoppers to veer away from local small businesses where there was plenty of know-how and friendly faces but not a way to buy a watermelon, laptop, toilet plunger, birthday card for grandma and get a hair cut all in one trip.
There were giant billboards towering over the shopping complexes as well as tiny marquees in front of smaller businesses reminding people to do their part by buying things from locally-owned stores. These smaller stores weren’t able to advertise as forcefully as some of the bigger stores on their own, but when they worked together they put together a nice little campaign to remind our city which stores had built the community up in the first place.
