Main street matters

I still think about a sign I noticed in a small retail shop while traveling. It read, “When you support a local small business, you’re supporting a local dream.” Pair that with something the late football coach Lou Holtz once said. “Ability is what you’re capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.” Put those two ideas side by side and you get the real formula for whether a Main Street business survives or closes its doors for good.

The numbers behind that formula are bigger than most people realize. Small businesses now number more than 36 million across the country, and they employ over 62 million people, nearly 46 percent of the entire American workforce. In rural counties, the share is even higher. Small firms make up more than 95 percent of all business establishments outside our metro areas. That is not a supporting cast. That is the leading actor and the whole production.

And people are showing up for it. Heading into the 2025 holiday season, 86 percent of American households said they planned to shop small, a jump of more than 10 percent from prior years, with Gen Z and Millennial shoppers leading the way at nearly 89 percent. According to SCORE, 67 cents of every dollar spent at a small business stays right there in the community, 44 cents to the business itself and another 23 cents circulating through other local businesses it buys from. That is not charity. That is an investment loop, and it is one of the few investment loops left that pays the whole community back.

Here is what has not changed since I first wrote about that sign. Capability and motivation only get a business halfway there. The rest depends on whether if the community actually believes the business deserves to win. I still meet towns bursting with confidence, where leaders and residents alike expect success and treat every setback as a problem to solve rather than a wall to give up in front of. I still meet other towns that view every obstacle as permanent wall, and it shows up in empty storefronts and shrugged shoulders. The difference is never talent. It is belief, carried all the way from the mayor’s office to the coffee shop counter.

A college professor once asked our class what separates creative people from everyone else. After a room full of guesses, he gave his answer. Creative people believe they are creative. Everyone else does not, so they never try. I think about that every time I walk a thriving downtown next to a struggling one. The buildings are not that different. What is different is whether the people inside them, and the neighbors walking past, believe something good is still possible there.

Lou Holtz understood that the whole team always outperforms the sum of its parts. Main Street works the same way. One passionate shop owner cannot rebuild a downtown alone. It takes second line leaders, the chamber board members, the civic club presidents, the teachers who mention local shops to their students, all catching the same vision and pushing it forward. When an entire community catches that vision together, dreams that looked impossible start showing up in storefront windows.

But belief must be matched by execution, and execution today means meeting customers on their own terms. Shoppers now move fluidly between browsing online at night and buying in person the next afternoon, and they expect the businesses they support to show up in both places. A shop that treats its website, its social media, and its front door as three separate afterthoughts is quietly making the same mistake that once showed up as early closing times. The lesson has not changed, only the hours have moved. Meeting the customer halfway now means being visible and reachable whenever they are ready to buy, not just when it is convenient for the register. While the numbers vary by communities, over 60% of all retail transactions take place after 5:00PM – when does your business close?

None of this is abstract for the town you live in. Every dollar that leaves your Main Street for a distant Wall Street headquarters is a dollar that will never fund your Little League team, your food pantry, or your Fourth of July fireworks. Every dollar that stays is fuel for the next dream, the next storefront, the next generation willing to bet on itself.

So here is something you can do before the day is over. Walk, drive, or click your way to one locally owned business you have not supported this month and spend something there today. Then tell one neighbor why you did it. Community belief spreads the same way commerce does, one transaction and one conversation at a time. Do this as if your communities life depended on it, because it does!

John A. Newby, a Chamber CEO, Publisher & Media Executive, Business Owner, Consultant, and International Speaker is the author of the “Building Main Street, Not Wall Street” a column dedicated to helping local businesses & communities build stronger foundations allowing them to thrive in a world where local is lost to Wall Street interests. His email is john@truly-local.org

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