If you look sharp you might see justsnarky and pals taking in Main Street in downtowns like Wayne, Berwyn and Malvern today - I love the cool shops we have and abhor malls, big box sameness, and mall rats. Any excuse for me will do to get me away from places like the King of Prussia Mall. Besides, a little retail therapy and a man-pedi are good for the soul - maybe lunch at White Dog if they are open???
So check out your local merchants today for Small Business Saturday.
Check out an article in the Inquirer - I would have thought local papers would have done more, but oh well..
Posted on Sun, Nov. 21, 2010
In holiday shopping, Small Business Saturday is small business' rebuttal to Black Friday
By Diane Mastrull
Inquirer Staff Writer
The Friday after Thanksgiving has seen Ali Kutner practicing a sad custom in recent years.
She opens her Bohema Artisan & Vintage Boutique on Ridge Avenue in Roxborough, only to experience none of the buying mania that prompted the day's designation as Black Friday - black as in profitable.
.....And perhaps they won't be this Black Friday, either. It's the day after Saturday, Nov. 27, that Kutner and small-business owners and advocates nationwide are hoping - and Facebooking and blogging and tweeting - to make their own.
"This is the beginning of what I think is going to be a beautiful tradition," said Cinda Baxter, the blogger who helped trigger it.
The idea behind Small Business Saturday, also being promoted on radio and TV and with newspaper advertisements by American Express, is to remind consumers that there is more to holiday shopping than "big boxes and national chains," and that dollars spent in small, independently owned stores also are an investment in their host communities, said Baxter, a former stationery-store owner from Minneapolis who is now a retail consultant.
"For every $100 spent . . . $68 returns back to the local economy from payroll and taxes to related business expenditures," Baxter said in a phone interview last week. That local return drops to $43 if spent in a big-box store, she said.
For the good of local economies, a piece of not only the Thanksgiving weekend shopping pie but all shopping "desperately has to be shared with independent bricks and mortar again," Baxter said.
How that thought became a nationwide movement with American Express as its primary sponsor began as a call-to-action blog post by Baxter in March 2009. She urged her readers to think of three independently owned businesses they would miss if they disappeared, and to consider that "if half the employed population spent $50 each month in locally owned businesses, it would generate more than $42.6 billion in revenue."
From that, The 3/50 Project and its website, http://www.the350project.net/, followed.
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