The holiday shopping season is critical to the vitality of boutique businesses. It’s to the point that in the U.S. Small Business Association’s latest quarterly index report, 79% of small business owners in America say the holiday season is the lifeline to their existence.
It appears that what goes around comes around when it comes to shopping locally. Data by Capital One Research shows $68 per every $100 spent at small businesses typically stays to benefit the local community.
However, between the popularity of shopping online and the not-so-popular tariff induced prices, the small retailers’ livelihood is on the precipice of keeping their lights on or closing their doors for good.
With recent inflation and tariffs, the Small Business Index shows 58% of owners are forced to raise their prices this holiday season, while 52% expect they will still lose revenue. For local business owners like Sarah Simiele from the Curd Nerd it means cutting some of her favorite holiday products from store shelves this year.
“I was too nervous that they would come in at too high of a rate. And thank God I did because they really would have killed us if we'd had to pay for some of those things,” she said
The French National Federation for the Dairy Industry estimated tariff’s on Gruyère, for instance, will drop shipments of the beloved cheese to the U.S. by 25%.
Despite the threat of rising costs, experts in marketing and economics like Sunderesh Heragu with Oklahoma State University predict certain items like “locally sourced, locally produced, one-of-a-kind-artifacts [will] have a competitive advantage during the holiday season.”
For example, Rocco Leone’s vintage store, Salt City Wearhouse in the Heart of Syracuse Collective, has curated true Americana clothing from the 40s to the 90s that are artifacts of their own.
“I just want people to come shop here. I want people to look at the items here and try them on and feel them,” he said, prioritizing in-person customers to shoppers online.
Upstairs from Salt City Wearhouse at Allison Ferris’ shop, Ferris Lite, she stocks her shelves with products from women-owned or queer-owned U.S. companies.
“They could just go to Target and grab a $20 candle there,” she said while offering a scented candle that smelled like pine trees with a faint tobacco undertone. “You can come here and smell something that came from North Hollywood and was hand poured.”
Those tactile lures are a brick-and-mortar store’s best defense against obscurity when competing with impersonal online retailers increasingly edging out the smaller mom and pop shops. The National Retail Foundation reported a total of 129.5 million consumers shopped in-store while 134.9 million consumers shopped online.
“If it's not on life support now, it seems like it will be in the not-too-distant future,” warned economist Heragu, “because the trend towards online shopping is increasing over time.”
Back at the Curd Nerd, shop owner Simiele has one holiday wish for her community.
“If you can put that $20 towards your local shop instead of towards one of the big guys,” she said earnestly, “please think about it.”
Online competitors and tariff troubles aside, all three shop owners said they are committed to meeting their customers in person at least through Christmas Eve and, they hope, well after the holiday season frenzy has ended.
