Tomorrow, Saturday, November 30, is Small Business Saturday. This is a holiday that was generated by American Express in 2010 to encourage consumers to shop local, and small for the upcoming holidays. Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals drive consumers to purchase mass amounts of products online, and in big box stores. Small Business Saturday lies right between the two, and is a great opportunity to support your local artisans and shops.
Small businesses are the backbone of the North American economy. A business is considered small if it employs 1-99 individuals. It was reported by the Government of Canada that they make up 97.9% of all businesses registered here. They employ 8.3 million individuals, which is just shy of 70% of the private labor force. Between 2013 and 2017, those small businesses created 428,000 jobs.
With statistics like that it is easy to understand why we should be supporting small, local businesses. We recently published an infographic detailing the ways that local distributed manufacturing benefits the circular economy. Primarily we considered; job security, the environmental impact, flexibility of production, sustainability, national independence, and financial independence. Small business production truly impacts all of our lives here in North America.
These businesses thrive on your support. You can help support them in many ways.
1. Shop locally.
2. Choose to purchase your holiday gifts there this season.
3. Partner with a small business.
4. Share their posts online.
5. Leave reviews on their social media or Google accounts.
6. Use word of mouth to promote their product.
7. Include them in local events, like craft sales.
8. If you have an event at work, suggest to your employers that you use their products.
9. Display their products somewhere that friends and family will ask about them.
10. Subscribe to their newsletters or feed for more information.
We ourselves are considered a small business. Omachron Plastics Inc. was originally established to demonstrate the commercial viability of plastic manufacturing processes by producing low stress machinable blocks and rods in a wide range of colors, shapes, and sizes, at very affordable prices. While it was supposed to be a temporary entity, blocks and rods became so popular that we decided to continue producing them for sale. We originally started with ABS and HDPE plastics. We are expanding our line and producing standard rods and blocks manufactured from additional plastics such as Polycarbonate, Delrin, CAB, PVC, and others.
If you or a friend are considering plastic as a gift this Christmas, don’t forget to check out our specials this season. We’d be happy to keep in touch with you on a regular basis, so please subscribe to our newsletter. Remember to support small this Saturday!