I've spent part of my morning finalizing my plans to help promote Small Business Saturday. The annual program started by American Express to place focus on small mom and pop businesses the weekend of Thanksgiving is a great movement that more need to promote.
Small Business Saturday continues to gain attention, and revenue to those small shops that line every little (and not so little) towns in this country. According to an article written last December by Alvaro J. Soltero for Industry Beat, Small Business Saturday generated $5.7 billion dollars in sales for those participating merchants. That was up 3.6% from the prior year.
Awareness of the campaign continues to grow as well. Awareness in the program grew to 71% last year, compared with 67% in 2012. Maybe more importantly, 46% of those aware went out of their way to shop at small businesses the Saturday after Thanksgiving.
The article had some other great stats as well about the program. Details at: https://leaf.me/blog/the-numbers-are-in-small-business-saturday-2013-facts-and-stats.html
Clearly if you are working with small businesses, this is a no-brainer program to get them participating. The cost is free, and American Express does a great job of sending out promotional materials, marketing materials and more. If you are a media outlet, do what I did and become a neighborhood champion, and then create marketing opportunities around the event for your participating businesses. Signing up only takes a few minutes. Visit https://www.americanexpress.com/us/small-business/shop-small/ and get ready for the big event November 29.
I cannot encourage you enough to find a way to support the locally owned, small business in your community. Sure, I shop at Macy's or Walmart. But I do try to find non-chain store opportunities as well. The stability of local media, local entities like chamber of commerce and something as simple as Main Street in every town is at stake, if we don't make sure local stores are supported.
Something as simple as a walk down a small town downtown area can be very eye-opening. As publisher of the then-daily newspaper Rushville Republican, I would walk down the street and see a decent variety of businesses trying to survive, trying to keep employees with a job, trying to keep paying taxes, trying to support local causes....you get the point. Sadly, a walk down through downtown Rushville today is stark even a few years later. I'm not just picking on Rushville, Indiana as you can experience similar vacant business fronts just about anywhere you go in small town America.
Just maybe with programs like Small Business Saturday, a few more of those vacant store fronts can come back to life, and with that keeping the American Dream alive and well too.
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