Maybe you heard about a campaign to promote local small businesses by shopping on a certain day? Their vendor list is extensive, including cars, hardware, sushi, guns, bicycles, pizza, dental services, cameras, lingerie, jewelry, liquor and other stuff (no landscape architects though).
What do these companies have in common? Credit cards. It seems this “small business” thing with its look of grassroots, viral marketing is backed by Big Money. They’re using Facebook and another web site that links back to their Facebook page. They’ve even registered their small business promotion’s name so that typing it here would earn a nasty letter and fine from their legal department. They trademarked another slogan ending with “small”. I can’t type that here, either (freedom of speech only goes so far, apparently).
Their site exhorts people to shop small to help the economy. I suspect the economy in question is theirs. They must need the money. They only netted a paltry four billion dollars last year, according to web based sources.
$4,000,000,000?! Can this be true? Yet they claim to truly promote small and local businesses? I feel hoodwinked, hornswaggled, flim-flammed, misled and abused. I feel like a horde of ticks has attached itself to our small, local economy to suck money from local businesses and inflate a giant throbbing mother tick far away.
If only a true group of small business could get together and do something real, something viral, affordable, free of mega-corporate control. A group that would promote businesses whose employees would all fit comfortably inside one or two mini-vans, even if we don’t take the right brand of plastic.