🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
For small businesses like mine, the last 24 months have been a series of crises, each one getting a little harder to bear. From lockdowns to mask panic to vaccine mandates to inflation to labor and supply shortages to logistics problems, each hurdle takes out a few more of us. Each time, we think we've gotten past the worst of it. Then the next crisis comes for the survivors.
I own three small businesses (yes, I am a masochist). My husband Nikola and I own and operate a marketing company that creates photo and video content for businesses and an apparel print shop that provides direct-to-garment apparel printing for businesses and brands. My side hustle, Vintage Voyage, rehabs vintage campers with the help of local artists and offers them for rent.
So I have three different insights into the labor and supply chain disruptions. I've experienced them from the marketing sector, the travel sector, and the consumer goods sector. And from where I stand, the recovering economy looks about as recovered as an addict at a bar paying lip service to 12 Steps while staring at a highball full of bourbon.
Here's what the supply chain and labor shortage look like close up:
Our company's clients have been complaining to us of shortages of fish from the Barents Sea; there's no one to work the nets. Chicken wings are also in short supply, and many restaurants have removed them permanently from their menus. After the wings came blue textiles. Why blue, you ask? The pigment has become difficult to find.
Aluminum was the next shortage that popped up on our radar. A distillery owner we interviewed in Maryland gave us a tour of the warehouse where he is stockpiling empty cans, which are now so expensive he is taking a loss on each can of beer he sells.
Then a recent email in my inbox from one of the suppliers for my print company let clients know that screen-printing ink will be rationed to half the amount they bought the year before, and the available colors will be limited, too.
Another of my companies rehabs and rents vintage campers. We had to pass on a warehouse space and stop all unnecessary expenses when sheets of luan jumped from $11 a sheet to $28. We've been priced out of the construction materials market. What started off as a promising idea for an independent travel business has been sidelined by gas prices and uncertainty. This endeavor will likely not survive the "recovery" into 2022. Of course, this does not mean we don't still owe money on our micro-loan.
A quick math session revealed that my little marketing company has lost approximately $10,000 in contracts in the last two months alone; no sense in spending money on video production and photos when your goods are trapped on a boat and your staff has not returned to work. It's a drop in the bucket for a larger company, but the difference between payroll or no payroll for mine.
The prevailing attitude among my fellow business owners is stoic. After all, we saw this coming. We all knew that the two years following shutdowns would be more difficult than the shutdown itself. We knew the money and the sympathy would dry up quickly when people are not able to buy their goods and government assistance came to an end. We knew the news cycle would ignore us except to paint us as entitled cogs in the consumer machine who just can't believe that we've found ourselves in this globalized market.
After all, we are the Scrooges who complained about $15 an hour wages (which I have always paid), who insisted on keeping our doors open during a pandemic and who refused to do their civic duty by enforcing vaccine mandates.
Or maybe we did do all those things, but now we have nothing to sell. Either way you look at it, we are the enemy.
But we're not. We are also your neighbors, your coffeeshop, the dry cleaner that removed the wine stain from your favorite jacket. We are the employers who lowered our own salaries to be able to afford your health insurance—not because it was mandated but because it was the right thing to do, especially now. We are the bookshop owners who survived Amazon, only to shut down during COVID. We are the hardware store, the streetwear boutique, the pet shop, the barber, the ice cream stand. We are your neighborhood.
There was a time when the small business owner was the lifeblood of a confident society. Our determination, our self sufficiency defined communities in the United States from coast to coast.
Now we feel abandoned. When protests hit the streets, it was our windows that were smashed. When tent cities appear next to our building, it is our employees who are at risk. It is our community that is being torn apart by conflicting news reports and misinformation. It is our businesses that have lost not only revenue but two years of value that would have allowed us to create a legacy for our children, another young owner, and maybe even a retirement.
I am not your enemy, America. I am a just small business owner. And I'm still here. For now.
Constance A. Dunn is a small business owner and sometime writer.
The views in this article are the writer's own.
