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

Abound is the latest B2B site to announce that it is going to stop selling wholesale.  But in this case, there is a twist – on June 9th they are switching to a new business model offering drop shipping. The new program, which will be called Droply, is currently in a limited beta mode. But… Read More

It’s touching to know that the top Instagram hashtag today is #love. (It could be argued that anyone clicking on that link is looking for love in all the wrong places, but I digress.)  In case you’re new to the game, here is the definition of how hashtags work from Hootsuite: “Hashtags are clickable. Anyone… Read More

The last time I wrote about the federal minimum wage was 2016. At that time, Walmart had just announced that it was going to raise its hourly salary to at least $9.00 an hour – causing its stock to plummet 10%. Today their website states that Walmart is “continuously investing in higher wages, and the… Read More