Shop Small! This Saturday and Every Day...

Thanksgiving is nearly upon us, and with it comes a barrage of incredible deals from big-box stores, impersonal internet giants, and technological empires. In recent years, the holiday of Thanksgiving and its gratitude-centric aims (albeit ones that often cloud the deeply troubling roots of a holiday steeped in the mistreatment of native peoples whose oppression continues to this day) have been overshadowed by capitalistic, consumer-driven bargain shoppers manically sussing out the best deals on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. However, in between Friday and Monday, there is Saturday (as well as Sunday, but for the purposes of this post, we will focus on Saturday).

And on this Saturday, as an alternative to stampeding humans to death in the quest for cheap goods and staring bleary-eyed at a screen while you max out your credit card, my hope—and the hope of small businesses everywhere—is that you’ll get out and shop small instead.

Shopping small may not have the same mega-advertised savings and benefits as these other shopping-focused days of the holiday season, however, it does have the often undervalued and immensely impactful benefit of supporting small businesses to help communities thrive.

According the the U.S. Small Business Administration, as of 2018, 99.9% of US businesses are small businesses, which currently employ more than 47.5% of the private workforce in the U.S. and account for 1.9 million new jobs annually. Thus, small businesses are an integral part of the economic landscape.

As explained on SmallBusiness.com, Small Business Saturday was created in 2010 under the sponsorship of American Express in response to Black Friday. Since then it has grown into a national movement, garnering celebrity endorsements from the likes of Karlie Kloss and Hamilton creator Lin Manuel-Miranda (of whom I am a huge fan, by the way).

It’s celebrated in the U.S. on the last Saturday in November, and has gained serious momentum since its inception nearly a decade ago, with participation rates rising from 44% of the population in 2010 to a projected 77% in 2019.

Shopping small, of course, has an environmental benefit by reducing fossil fuel use in transportation to/from stores (both for the consumers and the goods they are consuming). Small businesses are often accessible to their local customer base by means of walking, biking, and public transit, generally offer a larger amount of locally sourced items, belong to the community and therefore act in the best interest of the local community (both environmentally and otherwise), utilize land less destructively than big-box stores, and sell higher quality products that tend to be more durable and therefore last longer. 

In addition to being more environmentally friendly and sustainable, shopping locally offers a multitude of other benefits, according to Forbes’ 5 Benefits of Shopping Locally on Small Business Saturday: 
-Shopping locally can revitalize communities as local businesses reinvest a higher percentage of their income into their communities than chains —nearly twice as much. You can learn more about this so-called "Multiplier Effect" courtesy of the American Independent Business Alliance.
-Supporting local businesses can also help create more local jobs.
-Local offerings can be diverse and are often unique from the routinely and uniformly stocked products available at chain stores.
-It can also strengthen local networks and provide services perfectly tailored to your unique cultural, social, and environmental geography.
-When local businesses are vibrant and thriving, it can increase real estate values in the area.

Of course, all of these benefits hold true not only on Small Business Saturday, but on every day of the year. If you’re in the practice of ordering countless items online or buying exclusively from big-box stores and chains, let this Small Business Saturday be a trial run of a more sustainable, community-driven, and intentional pattern of purchasing going forward that will benefit you, your community, and the environment.

For those of you rolling your eyes and scoffing at the idea of regressing in the midst of an ever-evolving digital age, you can of course utilize technology in your efforts to shop small. For example, some sellers on Amazon are small-business people. Amazon Handmade, in particular, offers a platform for artisans to sell their handcrafted wares. Likewise, you can search by location on Etsy to purchase items made by someone in your community. You can also utilize Google’s shopping feature to search for products available nearby.

Whether you find local products online or on the streets, shopping locally is just one of the many steps on our journey toward greener living. So, next Saturday head to your local cafe, peruse your local bookstore, and shop at your local grocers and boutiques. Source your goods and the gifts you’re buying for others locally. And, as always, let me know how it goes in the comments section below.

~Sam