Notebook: (1) Small Biz

by Ann Kjellberg, editor

Holiday window at our Winter 2024 Partner Bookseller, Community Bookstore in Park Slope, Brooklyn

Booksellers bring in around 20 percent of their annual sales during the holidays, an absolute live-or-die moment ensuring their survival for the year. In 2020, when all bricks-and-mortar retail was mortally threatened by the pandemic, and book production and distribution were further menaced with supply-chain blockages and delays, booksellers mounted a vigorous campaign to convince readers to buy books for their friends for the holidays early, to buy gift cards that would front-load the season with cash-on-hand, and to look to bookstores for other sorts of gifts as well. A Goliath-pestering advertising firm called DCX collaborated with the American Booksellers Association on a multi-city anti-Prime-Day installation called Boxed Out (see our Notebook of the time) to remind book buyers and passersby that, while local small business were reeling under the pandemic, the tech giants were raking it in, redoubling their existing advantages over their relatively lilliputian local rivals.

American Express pioneered the shop-local branding effort when, during the recovery from the 2008 recession, it created “Small Business Saturday,” sandwiched between the cash engines of “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday,” which overwhelmingly benefit nationalized corporate retail, to encourage holiday shoppers to shop at independent local outlets. (Small and medium-sized businesses, who are generally charged higher fees than large and global companies, account for 81 percent of American Express’s commercial receipts.) Jessica Ling, the executive vice president of global brand advertising for American Express who oversees the Shop Small initiative, recounted to Forbes that she grew up herself in a small-business family that owned a string of Chinese restaurants in New Jersey. “My first job in high school was working the takeout counter,” she said. “I know exactly what it is like to come from a family of entrepreneurs where you don’t get the weekend or holidays off.”

In its report on 2024 Small Business Saturday American Express projected spending of an estimated $22 billion by US consumers at independent retailers and restaurants this year, by 64.4 million shoppers, 8 percent more than in 2019. (Black Friday by contrast was expected to attract 132 million shoppers.) American Express estimates that the campaign has contributed $201 billion to local economies since its first year. This year American Express partnered with the US Chamber of Commerce to supplement the promotion with targeted donations to small business recovery efforts in areas damaged by Hurricanes Helene and Milton. (Our former bookselling partner Malaprop’s, in Asheville, North Carolina, told Publishers Weekly that its post-Thanksgiving weekend sales were below 2019 levels but exceeded expectations, and they had an “atypical” uptick in online sales.) American Express’s 2024 “Shop Small Impact Study” reported success in promoting consumer awareness of the value of shopping local: it found that 85 percent of survey respondents said they are likely to shop locally for the holidays—88 percent of (perhaps more corporate-skeptical) Millennials and Gen Z respondents. Three quarters agreed that “small businesses are essential to the community.” 84 percent of small business owners found the Small Business Saturday campaign beneficial. Forbes opined that a “psychological advantage small businesses have this year is the growing trend toward conscientious consumerism and so-called ‘slow shopping,’” “looking to support brands and retailers that are good environmental stewards and conduct business ethically.” Publishers Weekly spotted Kamala Harris shopping for cookbooks at Bold Fork Books in Washington, DC, on Small Business Saturday.

American Express argues that for every dollar spent at a small business in the United States, sixty-eight cents remains in the community, creating a further forty-eight cents in local spending as employees and businesses purchase goods and services locally. They calculate that if every shopper born after 1980 spent $10 at a small business on Small Business Saturday it would generate $2 billion in local economic activity. Further, as the US Chamber of Commerce argues, “when you support a local business, you’re also supporting your town, city, and neighborhood by way of paying sales tax. The sales tax money is used to support public schools, parks, roads, and sidewalks, as well as fund public service workers, like firefighters.” (One of cyber-businesses’s main advantages over small business is tax exemption. Jeff Bezos deliberately located Amazon in Washington State in order to elude sales tax, and the company’s ludicrously hyped national competition for a new HQ in 2019 became a staging ground for tax relief, redoubling the advantages the company would enjoy over neighboring local retail. Amazon and Microsoft succeeded in killing a 2018 Seattle tax initiative to address a spike in homelessness brought about in part by the pressures their own growth placed on city housing.) Celebrating the US District Court for Oregon ruling last week halting the merger between grocery giants Krogers and Albertsons, the Institute for Local Self Reliance noted that national retail consolidation drives down wages for workers and drives up prices for consumers; Institute for Local Self-Reliance co-executive director Stacy Mitchell wrote in an Atlantic article earlier this month on “food deserts” that relaxing antitrust enforcement in retail in the 1980s led to “a massive die-off of independent retailers,” that “from 1982 to 2017, the market share of independent retailers shrank from 53 percent to 22 percent,” and that “locally owned retail businesses were once a mainstay of working-class and rural communities.” (The ILSR collects studies on the benefits of local ownership here.) A unanimous 2011 Senate resolution in support of Small Business Saturday declared that small businesses employ half of US employees in the private sector, that they generated 65 percent of net new jobs during the previous seventeen years, and that 91 percent of consumers in the United States have small businesses in their community that they would miss if the business closed.

If it’s so obvious to these senators that local retail benefits consumers and the economic health of the nation, where are the programs to support it? It seems that by their very nature as small, locally focused entities they lack the leverage to advocate for policies that benefit everyone. For example, one of the main threats to independent bookselling (see our portrait of our current partner bookseller, Community Bookstore in Park Slope, and our story on Noëlle Santos’s effort to open the only bookstore in the Bronx, population 1.47 million) is unregulated commercial rents. The disappearance of affordable businesses from neighborhoods seeing rising residential real estate costs is a piece of the housing and segregation crisis that has become a chronic feature of American life.

We are at a moment when the incoming administration’s intentions with respect to reinforcing small businesses like bookstores (and other “businesses” with razor-thin margins that support an informed public, like journalism) is, as with so much else, uncertain. In some respects President-elect Trump’s cabinet picks represent a continuation of Biden Administration efforts to challenge the hegemony of Big Tech, for instance—personified in current FTC Chair Lina Khan, who got her start as a critic of Amazon’s anti-competitive practices and is currently pursuing a landmark suit against Amazon. Donald Trump’s proposed replacement for Lina Khan, current Republican FTC member Andrew Ferguson, like Gail Slater, his proposed replacement for Jonathan Kanter, Lina Khan’s counterpart in the Department of Justice, the Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division, and his proposed Federal Trade Commissioner, Mark Meador, all have a record of skepticism toward big tech. “Big Tech has run wild for years, stifling competition in our most innovative sector and, as we all know, using its market power to crack down on the rights of so many Americans, as well as those of Little Tech!” Donald Trump has posted, echoing the language of Silicon Valley investor and Trump supporter Marc Andreessen, who, as a venture capitalist, favors creating a favorable competitive environment for start-ups over existing behemoths. Gail Slater is a former advisor to Vice President-elect J. D. Vance—also a former tech venture capitalist—who has praised Lina Khan as “one of the few people in the Biden administration that I actually think is doing a pretty good job.” Mark Meador drafted a bill for his former employer, the ranking Republican on the Senate antitrust subcommittee, Utah Senator Mike Lee, echoing some of the arguments in the current DOJ antitrust case against Google’s ad tech business.

Perhaps more ominously for those of us who are concerned about the hegemony of big tech over public discourse, some of these appointees have also expressed as part of their rationale for opposing big tech an objection in principle to content moderation, which they see as hostile to conservative messaging …

Part Two of this post coming soon!

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Ann Kjellberg is the founding editor of Book Post. You can find her other “Notebook” posts on the writing and reading life and the life of reading and writing here.

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Community Bookstore and its sibling Terrace Books, in Park Slope and Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, are Book Post’s Winter 2024 partner bookstores. Read our profile of them here. We partner with independent booksellers to link to their books, support their work, and bring you news of local book life across the land. We send a free three-month subscription to any reader who spends more than $100 at our partner bookstore during our partnership. To claim your subscription send your receipt to info@bookpostusa.com.

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