Please stop celebrating Small Business Saturday

It's just an ad campaign for American Express.

Last week I was chatting with a group of new shop owners in our district who were planning to keep their stores open super late on Small Business Saturday to capture traffic from a late-night market happening on our block. When the conversation shifted to my plans for Fernseed, I apologized for not even considering participating. Our staff schedule was published weeks ago, and after five years of running this business—which include the COVID pandemic—I don’t have it in me to pull a late night last minute shift in the hopes that I might earn an extra $235. You can keep that money, thanks.

I’m open 7 days a week 355 days a year, so if people want to support a small business, they’re welcome to do that at 4 p.m. on a Tuesday in July. Why are we burning ourselves out in an attempt to capture the goodwill of shoppers on a day that is supposed to be celebrating us? That’s like having mom make Mother’s Day brunch.

But really, this is not a small business holiday. Small Business Saturday is an ad campaign created for (and trademarked by) American Express, launched in 2010 to position themselves as small business-friendly in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. American Express got $3.4 billion in bailouts from TARP, paid for by the American people, and not even two years later they tricked us into creating free marketing content—a lot of free marketing content—for their viral ad campaign.

I mean, I totally fell for it when it all started. You might remember this was the same time Instagram was really taking off as a social sharing platform, so shopping small on the day after Black Friday seemed like such a cool thing to ‘gram about! I’m sure I was aware that it was sponsored by American Express, but I think I just thought that made them a good company. How cute! Hashtag, hashtag, hashtag.

Me in 2014 with an American Express tote bag in front of Merz Apothecary in Chicago, proudly shopping small and creating free ad content for American Express!

Now that I own a small business, I have major skepticism around the idea that a credit card company, or any billion-dollar financial institution, is doing something good for anyone. (Side note: I participated in the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program in 2022 with the same cautious attitude. Wouldn’t you know, Goldman Sachs also got TARP money in 2008, and “10KSB” also launched two years later in 2010. Is this a coincidence? Are there other adorable small business things run by TARP recipients that launched in 2010? Someone investigate that! I’m too busy/angry.)

Whatever the reason Amex started this “holiday,” I decided a couple years ago that I would not work harder this weekend to market for them.

Last year I wanted to take it a step further. I had this idea to get all the storefront business owners I knew to close on Small Business Saturday. But the problem in small business is that you can’t close on a day with that much sales potential. Some of us are making 5% of our annual sales this weekend alone! So it’s absurd to think we could boycott the holiday as a middle finger to its inventor, even if they do charge small businesses the highest merchant processing fees in the industry.

I thought about doing a cash-only Small Business Saturday, but that also doesn’t work for business owners who don’t want to carry that much cash or whose customers probably don’t either.

Then I remembered those Visa ads from my childhood that ended with, “… but they won’t take American Express.”

The campaign was a jab at AmEx that showcased all the fancy restaurants and world-class sporting institutions that meant everything to Yuppies in the 1980s but that didn’t take their fancy exclusive credit card. (The ads all ended with, “Visa… it’s everywhere you want to be.”)

Those ads sparked an idea. What if small businesses just refused to take American Express on Small Business Saturday? That way we can enjoy all the benefits of their marketing campaign, but we’ll cut them out financially.

Could that actually hurt American Express? Probably not. If you consider that Amex accounts for about 10% of credit card transactions at small businesses, and their average merchant processing rate is ~2.3% (at Fernseed it’s 2.5-3.5%), and Amex reports that on Small Business Saturday, small merchants process around $17 billion in sales, then cutting Amex out of every transaction would only cost them around $39.1 million, which is a drop in the bucket (0.06%) compared with their annual revenues of $60.5 billion.

Still, as a campaign of awareness about merchant processing fees, it feels like the right occasion.

Right now, credit card companies are trying to push the narrative that pending legislation called the Credit Card Competition Act will harm consumer’s rewards programs and they’re pinning it on “greedy” merchants like Walmart. Visa and Mastercard are pushing the hardest on this narrative, as part of the Electronic Payments Coalition that funds sites like Handsoffmyrewards.com, but American Express is lobbying against it as well. As a small business owner I support the Credit Card Competition Act, so I want my customers to know that, and to encourage them to reach out to their legislators to support it on our behalf, or at least educate themselves about the false credit card points narrative being pushed by big financial institutions in an attempt to stop the CCCA from passing. So I could use “not taking American Express today” as small form of protest where the demand is to support the CCCA.

But I remembered hearing somewhere—I can’t remember where—that you’re not “allowed” to encourage customers use a card other than American Express. Is this true, or just one of those things you hear that’s been misinterpreted a thousand times like a game of telephone? Before I move forward with this little protest, I figured, I better check my Shopify POS merchant agreement.

Nothing about discouraging customers from using Amex (or any card) was specifically outlined in my agreement as far as I could tell, but when I Googled “Can I tell customers to not use American Express” I was pretty shocked at what I found.

American Express will absolutely come after businesses that “steer” customers toward using a lower fee card, in some cases going so far as to fine them or revoke their merchant agreements. You would think that businesses could just stop taking American Express if they didn’t want to pay the high fees, but this isn’t practical for some businesses or possible for others. (At Fernseed, we can’t turn off Amex for in-person Shopify POS sales, for example.)

This seems unfair, doesn’t it? The U.S. Department of Justice thought so too, I guess, because they sued Visa, Mastercard and American Express in 2010 challenging "anti-steering" rules that prohibited merchants from offering information to encourage the use of lower-cost payment methods. The DOJ argued that such restrictions hindered competition among credit card networks, leading to higher costs for merchants and, consequently, consumers. So this was an antitrust case.

Visa and Mastercard settled immediately, but American Express fought and appealed all the way to the Supreme Court to defend their monopoly, and in 2018, they won in a 5-4 decision. Not only does this mean that merchants continue to risk penalties if they encourage customers to use one card over another, it set precedent for antitrust cases going forward making it easier for monopolies to fight and win in the American justice system.

For this reason, I am considering canceling my American Express cards for both personal and business. I’m also going to stop taking American Express in Fernseed’s online shop, the only place we have a choice.

With this tangible information, I also plan to move forward with my personal boycott of Small Business Saturday by bringing attention to these issues with our customers. I’ll post something on Instagram, maybe include something in an email, and also post a laminated letter at our point of sale. Fun!

Do I expect widespread adoption of this boycott from all my fellow small business owners?

Not at all!

I mean, it would be great if we all did a coordinated dance about it, but this is a busy time of year, I get it.

I just want to start a conversation about how this day is perceived, so it maybe becomes more common to opt out of it, the same way we opt out of Black Friday if we can afford to.

I’m also hoping to combat the misinformation circulating about the Credit Card Competition Act, and to give people a tangible way to unite behind a cause that actually has (some) bi-partisan support—so rare!

I’m not trying to create an alternate small business shopping day for the general public. Nothing gets solved with a hashtag. The way to support small businesses is long term, not just with dollars (but always dollars if nothing else), but with policies on everything from local zoning to federal breakups of monopolies. It’s not as fun to market that, though, so it gets algorithmically downgraded and no one pays attention.

I guess this is just my tiny way of making sure even a handful more people are paying attention.

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