Small Business Everyday

I was sitting in a blues club in Chicago, and as the band played, their merch guy walked around the crowd with CDs to buy.

Someone from the crowd yelled towards the stage, “We love you guys!”

Without missing a beat, the singer shot back, “Don’t tell me you love me—buy my shit!”

It’s Small Business Saturday, the High Holy Day for local, small businesses. But for all the love they’ll get today, most of them will tell you how hard things have been. For every successful small business I’ve done a story on, there have been just as many simply trying to break even. They would tell you that the holidays are busy and good for business, but it’s the other 11 months of the year that keep them up at night. Many of them are, at least on the outside, popular, well-run businesses offering a great service or product. Some are historical, “I can’t imagine the city without it” kind of businesses.

But a great reputation can lead people to think that those businesses are “doing just fine without us”. They look so successful! There must be plenty of customers walking through the door for their food or clothes! They must be so busy with work that they don’t need another client or customer.

We say that we love them but, to be frank, we don’t buy their shit.

Look at where our money actually goes. Did you know that 43% of all retail spending in the United States goes to Amazon, Walmart, and Costco? We give half of the money we spend to THREE COMPANIES. This year the top 50 restaurant chains swallowed 65% of all U.S. restaurant spending—about $313 billion—leaving the rest of the country’s mom-and-pops to scrap over crumbs. Ten chains alone account for a quarter of every dollar we spend on eating out.

Meanwhile, the entire rest of the world does the opposite: in 2024, 62% of restaurant sales worldwide went to independent restaurants.

And if you think this only burns business owners, think again: when you spend a dollar locally, half of it stays in town—paying employees, rent, supplies, repairs, dance lessons, mortgages—every part of the invisible circulatory system that keeps a community alive. Spend it at a chain, and maybe 13% hangs around. Imagine the pitchforks if City Hall took 87% of your money, loaded it into a wealth cannon and blasted it straight out of town and into Seattle, Bentonville, or Atlanta.

But when it’s us doing it?

We smile, tap “Buy Now”, and call it Tuesday.

Facebook likes are great, telling friends “I love that place” is great. But the best support comes when we value a business enough to do those things AND pay a business for what it provides.

Love doesn’t keep the lights on.

I’m not here to trash Small Business Saturday. I love Small Business Saturday. But it’s wishful thinking if we pretend a one-day consumer pep rally can save the economic soul of a town, that we can check the box of community diligence one day a year and not engineer its collapse the other 364. If we want to prevent our country from an irreversible evaporation into chain-shopping ubiquity, we need to do more. We need to stop pretending a single Saturday—a municipal cheat-day—can fix this. We can’t benevolently hit-and-run community support and expect success.

One of the things we hear this week will be that “small businesses are the lifeblood of a community.” I don’t think that’s true. They’re important, for sure, but saying that this thing or that thing is the most important thing of all the things is just another way to excuse ourselves from the responsibility we have to our village, town, or city. People are the lifeblood of a community. WE make the community. WE have to make the community work. WE have to make the sometimes inconvenient choice to make things better for our neighbors now, and better for all of us in the future.

People are the lifeblood of a community, and what we do, say, and think determines the quality of that blood. The way we choose—in a thousand small and inconvenient moments—to actually participate in the place we live.

We need to do better than a day. We need to do better every day.

Here are a few ideas:

1) Go big on small. Make small businesses a big part of your life. But not just small businesses—one-to-one relationships, small groups of friends, small communities, small interactions with strangers. Go big on making small, people-centered choices. Hold the door, be curious, buy the kids’ lemonade.
2) Invest like you live here. That $1 you spend turns into 50 cents in a neighbor’s pocket.
3) Talk to people you can actually touch. You don’t have to actually touch them, hug them, or even like them. But we need to build a world made out of humans, not pixels.
4) Choose the harder thing sometimes. Park two blocks away and enjoy the walk. Wait an extra minute. Give them an extra tip because the food was late. Forgive the rough edges of a place that’s trying.
5) Don’t expect perfection from people who know your name. Chains can afford flawlessness—and they still can’t achieve it. Give local places the benefit of the doubt until they prove otherwise.
6) Leave room for improvement—yours and theirs. A little grace goes a long way. A little humility goes even farther.
7) Believe strong communities are built by small, consistent decisions.

We can’t become the communities we want by treating community like a seasonal hobby. If we want real places—places worth staying in, fighting for, raising kids in—we have to act like citizens instead of consumers. Communities don’t vanish all at once; they quietly dissolve when no one cares enough to pay attention. They evaporate when people say “I love you” but don’t turn that love into action. Places don’t fall apart dramatically; they come undone the way people do—through a slow accumulation of small neglects.

But they can be rebuilt the same way—one small choice, one small interaction, one small Saturday at a time.