Small Business Saturday is two days away! This is the perfect opportunity for you to show your customers how local businesses and communities thrive because of their patronage.

That’s a big deal.

So make Small Business Saturday a celebration. Make it about your supporters. Make it about your neighborhood. Don’t make it about long lines, discounted electronics and mini-meltdowns in some parking lot. Give your local customers a break from all of that. Let the other stores focus on their wallets. You get to focus on them as people.

Appreciate them. Offer discounts, free hot cider or coffee, and crank up Diana Ross and the Supremes so folks can dance while they shop in the name of love. Plan to have enough help on hand so the line at the register isn’t a mile deep – and if it is (yay!), for goodness sake, have someone hand out cupcakes!

They’re in your store on Small Business Saturday to support you. Show them that doing business with you makes them more than a credit card and a balance sheet.

This is a growing movement and one that can serve the economy well; when we all start buying stuff from each other, several things happen; we each buy something cool, useful and of value to us – the seller earns money for providing such a cool thing and we all come together a little closer in our community. This annual event mat soon grow into a movement of sorts, what if we promoted ‘shopping small’ once a month, then every Saturday? Imagine if that idea, the concept of shop-local-first became second nature to all of us? Imagine how it would change things; small business would grow, have to hire more people (at better wages than the big box stores) from the community, people who in turn become customers themselves because the money is earned and spent in our town.

Small Business Saturday – it’s a celebration, not a sale. -Mike Wolpert

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