Small Business Saturday Grows Up

Leslie Bowers’s customers arrived in droves the Saturday after Thanksgiving, increasing sales fourfold at Peace of the Earth, her Louisville natural bath boutique. They opened their wallets for Small Business Saturday, a marketing campaign created by American Express in 2010 that offers cardholders a $25 rebate to shop at local, independent stores the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

Many of Bowers’s customers were enthusiastic about Small Business Saturday but unaware that AmEx was involved. “We were actually shocked at how few people knew,” she says. “People are actively participating, but they don’t know that American Express started it.” This year may go down in retail history as the year Small Business Saturday transcended its status as a corporate promotional campaign to claim a place on the shopping calendar, sandwiched between Black Friday and Cyber Monday—the latter the 2005 brainchild of the National Retail Federation. As in the past two years, AmEx led the marketing push with ads on TV, in print, and online, while local retailers got the message to their customers face to face and through social media.