Small Business Rising was featured on this episode of Building Local Power. Small Business owners Danny Caine, owner of The Raven Book Store, and Natasha Amott, owner of Whisk, a homewares store, talk monopoly power, community impact, and the importance of joining together, across industry and geographic region, to call on federal policymakers to reign in monopoly power. Listen now:
Their conversation touches on:
Trends they’ve seen in their industries, and at what point they realized monopoly power was behind many of the challenges they are facing.
Why independent businesses are so important to communities.
Why it’s important for small businesses to come together across sectors to challenge monopoly power, and why small businesses and labor shouldn’t be pitted against each other.
The interconnected harms Amazon causes communities, including negative impacts on health, jobs, the environment, and more.
“To make this whole thing seem like this is just a single bookstore that’s mad about its prices makes it too easy to write it off. It’s much too narrow of a view of the argument. And as soon as you do any reading on the Amazon issue or about big tech monopolies, you realize just how many industries are affected by this, and how big Amazon is. So coalition building and teaming up both at the local and the national level, is vital to actually get something done, and also to convince people of the importance of this.”
“I hear David versus Goliath tossed around a lot, because we’re a little bookstore that has a really vocal anti-Amazon stance. But that’s not how I see it because it affects so many people. And if we all get together, we’re not actually that small. And I think Small Business Rising is a really important way to do that.”