Once the turkey feast is over, the shopping season for Christmas begins in earnest. But there’s an alternative to Black Friday this weekend: Small Business Saturday.
For more than a decade, the day has marked a way for small businesses to push back against large corporations, which take up a significant slice of sales on the busiest shopping weekend of the year.
Elisa Joy Payne is the executive director of the Hillsboro Downtown Partnership.
“Sometimes you remember the situation or the place where you purchased a gift more than you actually remember the gift that you bought for somebody,” said Payne. “And what better place to do that then in a cute little store on Main Street or the avenues and to have that memory, versus fighting the hoards of people at the malls or box stores?”
Payne said there is also “Plaid Friday” in place of Black Friday, in which people are encouraged to wear plaid to show their support for small and locally owned businesses.
Payne said Hillsboro has experienced hardships this year. At the beginning of the year, a downtown fire damaged more than 20 businesses and killed one person.
She said businesses still are recovering from the fire, on top of the years of the pandemic. But Payne added that people still open small businesses because their heart is in it.
“That’s what a small business is,” said Payne. “It’s somebody’s individual passion that they want to share with their community or their world and this is the opportunity for them to really showcase that.”
There are more than 32 million small businesses in the U.S.
Small Business Saturday was created and is promoted by American Express.
