The American Booksellers Association along with a dozen Small Business Rising coalition partners and hundreds of independent businesses, have declared March 20, 2024 as “SBA: Dump Amazon Day.” The Day of Action is to show opposition to the United States Small Business Administration's partnership with Amazon during its annual celebration of small businesses, National Small Business Week (NSBW), happening this year April 28 - May 4, 2024.
This comes on the heels of a November 2024 letter to the Small Business Administration, which POLITICO Influence covered. From the November letter:
“The undersigned members of the Small Business Rising write to express our disappointment with the U.S. Small Business Administration’s (SBA) past financial partnerships with monopolistic corporations—such as Amazon, Google, and Visa—for National Small Business Week (NSBW). We urge the agency to enlist partners who are aligned with the SBA’s mission to “help Americans start, grow, and build resilient businesses,” not mega-corporations that use their power and dominance in the market to stifle competition from smaller competitors.
“In 2023 and preceding years, the financial sponsors for NSBW included corporations targeted by policymakers and regulators for their predatory tactics and harms to smaller competitors and consumers. Amazon is currently the target of a complaint brought by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and 17 state attorneys general.”
“Over the past two decades, Amazon has grown a stranglehold on the book industry and crushed healthy competition in the marketplace for small business,” said Allison Hill, CEO of the American Booksellers Association. “It is preposterous that a government agency charged with assisting and protecting the interests of small business concerns and preserving free competitive enterprise would select Amazon as a co-sponsor of National Small Business Week.”
Amazon has spent the past two decades using anticompetitive behavior to run its small business competitors out of business, the Day of Action is focused on National Small Business Week, but it’s also a call to action about corporate power in this country.
The coalition is inviting and encouraging anyone concerned about corporate power, and Amazon’s attacks on small business and entrepreneurship, to join with them on March 20 to amplify this message.
Graphics and sample social posts from the American Booksellers Association are available here.
Contact: Ray Daniels, CCO, American Booksellers Association, ray@bookweb.org