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Small Business Saturday
Savvy shoppers already have been sharpening their debit and credit cards in anticipation of the biggest spending holiday of the year. With Thanksgiving out of the way, the hearty ones will find a queue to stand in outside of their favorite big-box store to capture what they believe will be incredible deals. Black Friday—and, increasingly, Black Thursday Night—has become the traditional gateway to holiday spending.
Falling on Nov. 24 this year, Black Friday is a windfall for large national merchants. Electronics and appliance giant Best Buy anticipates 2023 revenues of $44.5 billion, actually an 8.9% decrease from 2022 revenues of $51.8 billion. Discounter Walmart, however, is planning on 2023 revenues of $611 billion, a nearly 4% increase over 2022 revenues of $587.8 billion.
As for online buyers looking ahead to Nov. 27—Cyber Monday—ecommerce business is anticipated to boom more loudly than ever before. According to FTI Consulting, online retail sales likely will reach $1.14 trillion, total revenues that have been increasing 10% year over year. In fact, FTC predicts that 42% of all retail sales growth this year will be in the ecommerce market.
Sandwiched between these shopping holidays is Nov. 25—Small Business Saturday—devoted to encouraging shoppers to support the local economy by spending their shopping dollars with small local merchants who, in turn, recirculate their profits in the community. In a very real sense, this is the most significant shopping holiday of all.
Economic Lifeblood
“Small business represents the lifeblood of the U.S. economy, employing well over half of the workforce in the country,” says Tim Sheehy, president of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce. “Small businesses by their nature are customer-friendly, innovative and scrappy, and Milwaukee is well-served by the small to mid-size business we have.”
The pandemic hit small businesses hard across the country, when one in five businesses shut down between October 2020 and October 2021. Despite that, small business growth on a national scale is making progress—a 2.2 percent increase in 2022 over 2021. Locally, census data from 2020 shows the number of small businesses has remained stable between 2019 and 2020.
The Milwaukee metro area has more than its share of small manufacturing firms, Sheehy says, noting that only San Jose, California’s “Silicon Valley” has more manufacturers. Even though many such firms won’t be patronized on Small Business Saturday, they provide the area’s small business strata with significant economic strength.
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And Milwaukee’s small business tend to patronize each other, which Sheehy describes as “washing each other’s socks.” The best small businesses, he says, can sell outside the local market. “That brings in more socks to the washing machine,” he adds.
It’s in the Numbers
Some U.S. federal government programs define small businesses as having 500 or fewer employees. Using that parameter, small business employment in the area comprised of Milwaukee, Ozaukee, Washington and Waukesha counties is home to 28,614 small businesses that support 370,461 employees with a total payroll of $17.3 billion, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. According to Sheehy, MMAC uses a parameter of 100 or fewer employees, which changes the figures to 27,528 small businesses with 246,193 employees supported by a payroll of $10.9 billion.
The financial impact, in aggregate, certainly doesn’t measure up to Walmart’s performance, but it does illustrate how significant small businesses are, especially when you realize that the flow of funds largely stays local, Sheehy explains.
“Small businesses foster a symbiotic relationship,” he says. “The more you spend locally, the more products and services can be provided to the community. It makes a tighter supply chain and a healthier local economy.
“Shopping small business or using their services makes for a healthier local economy,” Sheehy adds. “We believe in shopping locally, not only in our day-to-day lives, but looking locally when it comes to finding vendors and suppliers that make our businesses run, too.”
