Small Business Saturday Is a Marketing Event, Not a Path to Independence
Small Business Saturday shows up every year with the same message. Support the little guy. Shop local. Keep your dollars in the community. It sounds good. It feels good. It is also a distraction from the reality that one designated shopping day will not change the conditions that push independent work to the margins.
The systems that drain small producers do it every day of the year. They do it through scale, distribution, pricing, and the expectation that independent operations should survive while competing with companies that can outsource everything and undercut everyone. One holiday will not repair that. It functions like a pressure release. People get to feel like they participated in something meaningful, then return to the same chains and platforms that created the problem.
There is another problem with the way this day is sold. Small Business Saturday is framed as a celebration of local work, but the entire event is owned and marketed by the largest corporate interests in the country. The advertising, the tracking systems, the payment processors, and the reach all run through the same pipelines that profit from scale. It presents the image of helping small operations but routes the attention through corporate platforms that take a percentage at every step. The day that claims to support independence is built on the same infrastructure that weakens it.
What gets lost in all the marketing is something people rarely think about. Most small businesses do not produce what they sell. The local restaurant buys its ingredients from the same regional distributors that supply every other restaurant. The decor shop orders its inventory from the same national wholesalers that ship identical products to stores across the country. Most flower shops purchase bulk stems from the same international brokers who fly flowers in from large operations in South America and Europe. The boxes, the invoices, and the supply chains are the same, and the prices are already shaped by corporate distributors long before anything reaches a storefront. Those businesses still have value. Many of them are doing everything they can to survive inside a system that was not built for them. But they are not producers. They are resellers operating on thin margins with pressure coming from every direction.
Production is something different. A farm, a workshop, a small manufacturer, or anyone who grows or builds anything from raw materials is carrying the full cost. There is no scale to hide behind and no outsourced labor to absorb the risk. It’s a different kind of work with a different set of pressures, and it cannot survive on a single weekend of attention. It survives because people choose it consistently and deliberately.
Buying direct matters. It matters because it removes the middle layers that drain independent work. When someone buys directly from a producer, the money stays with the person who did the work. There are no platform fees, no distribution cuts, and no corporate percentages. Direct support makes it possible for small operations to keep going without sacrificing their values in order to stay afloat.
Small Business Saturday will continue to show up each year. It will generate traffic and headlines. It will not fix the structural issues that independent producers face. It is a marketing event, not a solution.
If people want independent work to survive, the answer is simple. Consume less overall. Choose with intention. Support the people who create value directly instead of routing everything through the same platforms that undermine them. Independent producers don’t survive because someone declared a shopping day in their honor. They survive when people stop feeding the systems that push small operations to the edge and pretend to celebrate them once a year. The chains and platforms aren’t changing, and they don’t need to. What happens the rest of the year is the truth. Everything else is the cover story.