"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, the350project.net, followed.
With those, Baxter had a strong small-business advocacy voice, but "we didn't have the kind of podium" to convert the message into a national movement. Thus the collaboration with American Express.
