A few weeks ago I ran across something called Small Business Saturday. This was the day, I read, to support your local merchants, who live and work in the same community that you and your “loved ones” do. That’s suspect right there, I thought. It’s tired, unoriginal language, phrases that have been repeated in a million ways in a million formats. Much like the mostly mindless craze for any and everything the marketing team declares “green” or “sustainable,” this regimenting of sentiment around the folksy notion of shopping at small, locally owned businesses is, in my mind, little more than a stage designed specifically for the contortionists.
Small Business Saturday was orchestrated, managed and messaged by American Express. I’ve written and read many, many press releases, more than a few of which were issued with the sole purpose of distracting people from something else, but until the announcement of Small Business Saturday, I’d never read a release that included footnotes. So I read them, and there, amidst the tiny font, I learned that to reap the benefits of the campaign (which were quite slim, I think) a small business was required to sign on to accept American Express.
That, of course, is not cheap. In fact, it’s notably more expensive than accepting payment with plastic cards with other logos. The unadorned math of it is as follows: As people spend their dollars at stores that open onto sidewalks rather than malls, as they permit themselves the moment of grace that follows purchasing goods or services from a business that’s likely to donate to the little league team or the scholarship fund, what’s actually happening is that a greater portion of the purchase price is going not back into the communities where that money is spent but straight to the coffers of a global corporation.
That, my friends, is the essence of marketing: one thing is actually another.
