Hi, I’m Katherine Raz.

I own a brick and mortar plant and flower shop in Tacoma, Washington called The Fernseed. I opened the shop in 2019, 11 months before COVID. For the past year or so, I’ve been musing about whether or not it’s even possible, given the extraordinary set of constraints and uncontrollable economic factors independent retail businesses face, to make a living running a business like this.

I don’t think a lot of small businesses are communicating honestly about this experience, and I get why. We don’t want to scare our employees. We don’t want to look as if we’re asking for sympathy. We don’t have the answers, so why write about the problem? Our businesses—and our relationships with our customers—feel as though they require us to maintain a veneer of success, especially on social media channels, so the experience of running a struggling business can be incredibly isolating. I write about it in an effort to keep myself from isolating. I write about it because I know there are hundreds of businesses out there like mine suffering under the same conclusions but unable to talk about it.

Substack is a place where I can write honestly about this experience and engage in good faith conversation about what is happening out here. I have hope that we’re not all doomed, but I’ve come to the conclusion that the myth of self reliance, stick-to-itiveness, and entrepreneurial pluck is just that: a myth. That what we need out here is systemic change, and I have no idea at the moment what that looks like.