Local support crucial ahead of Small Business Saturday

For nearly a decade, Buffalo Street Books has served as Ithaca’s community-owned cooperative bookstore. As some residents may recall, it faced a significant financial crisis in 2017 where it had to raise nearly $100,000 to pay back vendors and publishers just to stay alive.

After an outpouring of community support saved the store, General Manager and buyer Lisa Swayze came in and worked to revamp the business. As she described, it was a rough couple of years, and 2020 felt like deja vu.

“We had our first year where we made a teeny tiny profit, and the entire history of the store last year barely eked that out,” Swayze said. “[We] still encountered more difficulties as we entered the beginning of this year, with payments due to vendors, … and then boom, pandemic. … We had to close, and we laid off almost everybody.”

Swayze quickly acted to keep the store alive, pushing up the development of an online store to be able to start online sales by April. On top of that, the bookstore started a GoFundMe for $25,000, and money from the fundraiser, loans and grants all helped to stabilize the store through the summer and the past couple of months. But things still aren’t easy.

“So far, for the most part, we’re coming out every single month not at a profit,” Swayze said.

Swayze isn’t alone. As Tompkins Weekly has covered before, small businesses are among the hardest hit during the pandemic. While some have seen improvement since spring and summer, many are still struggling as the pandemic has continued into the fall.

This is why business owners and the local organizations that support them are hoping that the upcoming holiday shopping season will provide the resources owners need to make it through the winter.

The challenges small businesses have been facing the past couple of months are much of what they faced earlier in the year — employee and supply shortages, difficulties adapting to COVID-19 restrictions and the overall uncertainty that makes it hard to plan ahead.

“One of the biggest challenges is staffing because of the safety rules and regulations,” said Greta Perl, owner of Alphabet Soup in Ithaca. “We often need to have two staff on the sales floor at any time — one who can do the register and the other person who can greet people at the door and make sure there’s mask compliance and help people as they shop.”

For Mansour Jewelers owner Michael Abdulky, the challenge is supply.

“We still had a busy engagement season, wedding season, all that,” he said. “But the hardest thing is probably finding different products. Some vendors were shut down for a little while, and then with not as many goods coming in from overseas, it made it a little bit difficult to get certain items.”

For newer businesses like Odyssey Bookstore and Gorges Cycles, who have only known business during COVID-19, the challenges of operating during the pandemic have blended with the usual challenges of opening a new business.

Odyssey Bookstore opened earlier this year across from PressBay Alley after its original opening day in March fell right on the first day of pandemic shutdowns in the county. Owner Laura Larson said since she’s never owned a business before, she’s tried to stay flexible and adapt to whatever challenges are thrown her way.

“I don’t ever sit in someone else’s shoes, but I feel like, for other people, the challenge was a pivot,” Larson said. “For me, I was always moving in the direction of learning how to be open. So, instead of having a business I had to shift, I was like, ‘OK, I’m trying to open a business. What does it mean to open in a pandemic?’”

Gorges Cycles in the Triphammer Marketplace is much newer, having only opened in September. Owner Thomas Steffie said that the supply shortages on bikes and bike materials have made it difficult to fill inventory, but there is a flip side to that coin.

“The pandemic caused the bicycle industry to basically wipe its inventory out early on,” he said. “So, I’m one of the few bike shops who has any bikes, and I have bikes because nobody knows I’m here. So, it’s a good way to get started.”

While specific challenges vary across industry and business age, small businesses are collectively still seeing less revenue than would be expected for a typical fall season. In Ithaca, for example, Gary Ferguson, executive director of the Downtown Ithaca Alliance (DIA), spoke to the loss in customers.

“Foot traffic continues to be down relative to what it’s been, what we expect it to be in past years,” he said. “We checked our pedestrian counters, and we’re still off downtown by at least 50%. … So, it gives you one indication of the challenges that businesses of all types have simply because there’s just fewer people doing that.”

And while some saw improvement in late summer and early fall, the recent uptick in COVID-19 cases across the nation, including Tompkins County, has led some to fear the possibility of another shutdown period.

“We’ve been pretty lucky around here. Now, all of a sudden, we’re having a turn,” said Steven Daly, owner of Ithaca Vintage in Trumansburg. “It seems like there’s an uptick [in COVID cases]. So, I think there’s some concern about things going forward. … Everybody’s back inside, things had started to seem like they were going up, and now, we’ll have to kind of wait and see what the winter brings us.”

Looking ahead to the holiday shopping season, several sources expressed concern that past challenges could worsen as shoppers flood into stores.

Where crowds are the typical scene the weekend after Thanksgiving and well through December for many businesses, social distancing and safety regulations make that impossible. And while most businesses can predict how much they’ll make over the holidays, COVID-19 means it’s difficult to tell how best to prepare.

“Months ago would have been the time I’d be normally ordering all of my holiday inventory, but when you have no idea what to expect, it’s such a huge, giant risk to buy all that when you don’t know if people are coming,” said Deirdre Kurzweil, owner of Sunny Days of Ithaca. “But you also want to make sure people do come out, that there’s going to be stuff there too that they want to buy. … So, it’s a crazy kind of balance that we’re dealing with — a guessing game, for sure.”

Across the county, local organizations have worked to support small businesses through both new and continuing challenges. At the city of Ithaca, financial support efforts like the Ithaca Anchor Storefront Recovery Fund have helped businesses make it through.

“Since the beginning, we’ve been collaborating with partners at the Chamber of Commerce and the Downtown Ithaca Alliance and TCAD [now Ithaca Area Economic Development] and the Small Business Development Center, among others, to provide direct technical assistance and support to small businesses,” said Thomas Knipe, deputy director for economic development for the city of Ithaca.

At the DIA, one of the biggest efforts has been a push to promote the whole weekend after Thanksgiving as Shop Small Weekend, rather than just Small Business Saturday or Black Friday.

“We know people have a choice in where they shop, and we know that people are looking for ways so that they don’t have to leave their house or they leave their house for very limited time,” DIA Marketing Director Allison Graffin said. “Our downtown has worked tirelessly to make it possible to do that.”

And businesses have also taken to supporting one another.

“There’s a lot of collaboration happening now with some of our businesses,” DIA Communications Manager Darlene Wilber said. “They’re taking their social media campaigns and combining efforts to support each other, which is huge. … They recognize that that’s going to help them and help the community by supporting each other.”

Sources interviewed for this story universally spoke to the importance of the upcoming shopping season for small businesses.

“Small businesses is really the main way of doing business, especially in smaller towns; and in upstate New York, I think it’s way more important to support your small businesses because we’re supporting our neighbors, we’re supporting our friends, we’re supporting our family,” said Jason Sidle, director of operations at Coltivare in Ithaca. “And a lot of people have taken a huge hit over the course of the last seven months.”

As Knipe put it, the pandemic has caused a shift in the way commerce is done, which has put small businesses in an even more precarious position as the holiday shopping season approaches.

“With the pandemic, many people have gotten comfortable making purchases online, and the holidays — and the post-Thanksgiving time specifically — that’s a really important time for retail sales,” he said. “That’s a make-or-break period for a lot of our local small businesses.”

Swayze can speak to that first hand.

“We’re really, really counting on holiday sales, as I think everyone is,” she said. “It’s normally 30% of our total income for the year that happens in November and December. So, we’ll see how that works out for this year.”

Ferguson added that everyone will need support as the pandemic continues for the rest of 2020 and into the new year.

“We’re going on our eighth and ninth month, and there seems to be more months in the future ahead for us of pandemic,” he said. “At some point, even people who have reserves run out of them. And we don’t want to be in a position where we turn around and look and find there are no more local businesses left. That would not speak well for our community.”

Colleen Robinson, co-owner of Synergy: Trumansburg Physical Therapy, added that she and others have seen the county come together before, so she hopes residents will do so once again.

“For our whole community, it is so important to support each other as best we can,” she said. “We have a vibrant, interesting, active and fun community. We need to support each other so that when this pandemic ends, we are all living well and can get back to interacting in the ways we all love.”

Though the holiday shopping season looks different this year, sources stressed that there are still plenty of ways to support your local small businesses while also staying safe. Several of the businesses interviewed for this story — and many more throughout the county — have created new ways for customers to shop, like building their online stores and curbside pickup services.

If you’re looking to support small businesses this shopping season, sources offered a few pieces of advice. First, start your shopping early to minimize crowding as we get into December. Second, call ahead and see what services your favorite businesses may offer that can allow you to stay safe from the virus while also patronizing businesses in need.

“Before people resort to the safest possible thing and just going straight online to Amazon, [I hope] that they will stop and look locally and spend a little bit of extra energy,” Kurzweil said. “I know it’s extra work to do that. But see what they can do locally, even if they don’t feel comfortable going inside a store.”

Daly shared that sentiment.

“Remember to spend your money here,” Daly said. “As much as you can, buy local. These people, they’re all of our neighbors, and everybody can use your support. … Think about where you’re spending that money and who’s it going to, and then remember all the things that all these businesses and individuals bring to our community. And let’s keep it that way.”