Ten days ago a popular downtown restaurant here in Madison, Wisconsin announced a GoFundMe campaign to raise $175,000 to help them recover from COVID debt and ongoing rising costs.  A few days later a local chocolatier posted a GoFundMe with the ambitious goal of raising half a million dollars to build a chocolate factory.  The… Read More

When you hire an employee, you’re required by the United States Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS ) to complete and retain a Form I-9. If you have some copies of this form on hand, you can use them through October 31 – but after that, you could face penalties if you don’t switch to the… Read More

Barbicore was one of the  examples I mentioned a few weeks ago in describing the use of the word “core” to describe a trend that is part visual, part lifestyle.  In the case of Barbie, the emphasis is mostly on the color pink (coupled with a desire for fun).  According to People magazine, donning pink… Read More

Given the importance of Facebook and Instagram to small business promotion these days, the fact that parent company Meta has launched a new social media platform is big news.  Threads is similar to Twitter, which claims a higher organic reach than other social media platforms. Founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed that Threads reached 100 million sign… Read More

“Cottagecore aesthetic draws inspiration from pretty farmhouses and countryside cottages,” according to an article on Contractors.com. “Cabincore, on the other hand, hints toward cozy cabins and woodland lodges.” Other sources mention that Barbiecore is going to be big this year, along with Mermaidcore.  In case you missed the memo, the suffix these terms all have… Read More

Amazon Prime days will soon be upon us – this year they are July 11 and 12. Now that Amazon takes such a big bite out of all of our sales, it’s easy to forget that their first target was bookstores.  But the American Booksellers Association, whose members have been hard hit by the online… Read More

How do you make sure that everyone on your staff knows what’s happening in the store? We have always used an employee newsletter, originally printed and put in our staff members’ files along with their biweekly paychecks. Now that they all use direct deposit, they get the newsletter via email. We also print and post… Read More

I remember reading Howard Schultz’s book Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time when it came out in 1997.  In a Linkedin article about the book, Ashutosh Saxena says that Starbucks offered the best-in-industry employee benefits, even to the part timers. “Schultz proudly talks about how many… Read More

It’s always fun to test yourself in a multiple choice quiz with unexpected answers – so here is one for us shopkeepers. I don’t have a good way to make the correct answers hard to read, so no cheating! A. How many retail establishments (of any size) are there in the US? B. What is the… Read More

An open sign has been described as “a beacon of connection between businesses and consumers.”  While this may be a bit melodramatic, it’s true that nothing is better at communicating that your shop is ready to welcome customers.  If you are in a mall, you probably have set hours. But for the rest of the… Read More