Small businesses get uptick, hope it lasts

On the rough road that is life as a small-business owner, consider how taxing the going has been for Drew and Heather Arata, owners of Earth & State, a pottery store in Media.

"We had to sell our car," Drew Arata said.

The 1997 Dodge Stratus went at the end of October, a move the couple made, he said, "to save money during a really tough year."

A month later, help arrived. Not the kind with four tires and a V-6 engine, but rather a national initiative to promote small business through newspapers, television, radio, and social media.

Called Small Business Saturday, it was an effort to steer shoppers to locally owned businesses the Saturday after Thanksgiving, on the weekend when Christmas spending begins in earnest.

As the new year dawns, of greater interest to small-business owners is something only time will tell: whether an uptick in sales some are attributing to Small Business Saturday will last.

The answer will depend on whether consumers embraced shopping locally according to the emotional yet practical view pushed by industry advocates: that dollars spent at small businesses go farther in support of host communities and their economic well-being than money spent at national chains.

Or was the Small Business Saturday allegiance a passing fancy, nothing more than a response to an advertising campaign offering rebates?

"I don't know" was as definitive as Christine Vilardo could be.

She is executive director of the Ardmore Initiative, an advocacy group for the 202 commercial properties in Lower Merion's Ardmore business district. An informal poll last week of 20 shop owners there showed that "business was better than last year; a few said it was status quo," Vilardo said.

The idea behind the Small Business Saturday movement, sponsored by American Express, was to seize a place for locally owned businesses in the holiday shopping frenzy.

To help entice shoppers into stores such as Earth & State, American Express offered a $25 credit to any cardholder who pre-registered and spent at least $25 on their Amex plastic on Nov. 27. The credit-card titan also offered free Facebook advertising to the first 10,000 small businesses signing up, defining such enterprises as those earning no more than $10 million in annual revenue.

To sustain the momentum, American Express subsequently extended the $25 credit offer through Dec. 31.

As of Dec. 2, the last time American Express assessed the effort's impact, 200,000 cardholders had enrolled for the credit, and 10,000 small businesses had received the free Facebook advertising.

"Based on our results, we're encouraged that many small-business retailers would have seen spending increases across other forms of payments as well," Kenneth I. Chenault, chairman and chief executive of America Express, said in a statement.

Tell that to Stuart Ballard. The owner - and sole employee - of Old Warrington School House Gift Shop was not among small-business owners feeling the love this holiday season.

"It's a shade better," he said of business this year compared to last.

But that's not saying much, he was quick to point out Tuesday morning, as he stood in his customerless store, a former schoolhouse built in 1765: "I've been subsidizing this place for five years."

He attributed lackluster sales of his antiques and collectibles to something very basic: "People have no money."

That has led to a trend Ballard finds particularly appalling: "Before, they wanted quality; now, they want junk."

Some, evidently, want green - as in products made from recycled materials, such as tote bags fashioned from old juice cartons. Tony Fisher, owner of Big Green Earth Store, which opened three years ago on South Street, said that because sales were "better than expected," he's extending a lease on a temporary store he opened for the holidays in One Liberty Place.

Fisher said that he doesn't think Small Business Saturday helped his sales, but that a blast e-mail to the store's list of 4,000 addresses might have - plus an increasing embrace of sustainability.

At Earth & State, Drew Arata has no doubt the Small Business Saturday promotion helped boost holiday sales: They were up 41 percent over the Saturday after Thanksgiving 2009. American Express accounted for 30 percent of sales that day compared with 2009, when "not a single person used American Express," he said.

If this keeps up, it might help Arata own something to park once again.

"We can only borrow the father-in-law's car so much," he said.