The Friday after Thanksgiving is traditionally called Black Friday, the first big day and kickoff of the Christmas gift-shopping season. “Big Box” stores see lines of shoppers camping out overnight to ensure a first-in-the-door opportunity to buy limited inventory at the lowest prices of the year. And the frenzy of online buying on Black Friday and Cyber Monday seems to even slow down global access to the Internet.
Now a part of the American lexicon, many historians believe that the designation of Black Friday likely originated in our Philadelphia area in the 1960s. It was a term used by traffic reporters on the radio, sharing what they had been told by Philadelphia police and bus drivers who blamed the woes of high traffic volume on the Friday after Thanksgiving, when so many people used their day off to kick off their Christmas shopping. But Black Friday was also the term retailers gave to justify the traffic burdens that helped them emerge out of the red and into the black for profits over the whole year in just the last month of the year. By advertising to those shoppers looking for the best prices of the year, Black Friday became the annual event we now know it to be.
Small Business owners quite often live among us. We see them shopping where we shop and eating at the same local restaurants we enjoy, putting their money back into our community while they also employ others who live local to their business. These owners of Small Businesses often share their business expertise with local organizations, and they are frequently the only Sponsors of local events hosted in our community. Small Businesses invest in our community because our hometown is their local business market and, in many cases, it’s also the hometown of our local Small Business owners.
Small Business owners make possible the magazine you’re reading right now, as advertising Sponsors who fund our brand of social-media-in-print, which is Bringing People Together every month with each new issue, all year long. You don’t see Big Box stores and online marketplaces advertising on our pages. And you won’t…because the residents of Newtown Square are not specifically important to the success of any large business as much as we are to locally owned Small Businesses, which have limited marketing budgets. And yet, it’s those smaller businesses that have agreed to invest in our community, to show us how important we are to them by funding the cost of our hometown magazine, they see benefiting our community and their local business success.
Small Business Saturday® is November 28th. If you value local brick-and-mortar businesses, if you enjoy receiving Marple Friends & Neighbors in the mail or reading our online version at MarpleMag.com, then plan to Buy Local on Saturday, November 28th. And whenever possible, choose to do business with our hometown advertising Sponsors first because they are showing us, with every new issue, just how important we are to them for the success of their Small Business.