RE: https://mastodon.social/@tusk81/115652450433416685

[Gast]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@tusk81/115652450433416685

These small businesses owned by immigrants also help our communities succeed as micro-cultures. Small Businesses aren't just economic engines, they're cultural engines and they power the culture that we hold dearest. It's the kind of culture that makes one neighborhood different from another.

Large businesses have strategies to get you in the door and stay a while.

Small businesses form collectives or locate themselves in clusters of other symbiotic businesses in an effort to get people to hang out and create community. Some of it is out of self interest because supporting culture and community helps their business, but they are part and parcel of that culture themselves so it's also from the heart.

Small businesses create the culture that makes a place a place... your place. Nobody breaks down in tears if Starbucks closes a store in their town, but if the beloved coffee shop with local art on the walls shutters, there will be grieving because the loss is more than just coffee.