It can be very confusing to determine what products you want and what businesses you wish to support in an ever changing and heavily competitive market. With this, many people are claiming that you should be supporting small and black-owned businesses. This can, however, lead us to wonder how and why we should support them.
In short, you should support black-owned businesses because it helps support your local community while combating things such as racism, wealth inequality, and wage gaps by simply choosing where you spend your dollar.
There are so many reasons why you should support black-owned businesses, each with its own unique purpose and merit. With this, below are some of the most important reasons you should support your local black-owned businesses.
Supports Local Families
One of the main reasons why you should support black-owned businesses is that supporting them allows local families to stay in business.
While this reason may not revolve around race/inequalities in nature, it still has lots of merits. By supporting local black-owned businesses, you are really supporting a local family, who uses your customership as a basis to live off of.
To sum up, supporting black-owned businesses is really just supporting local families and other small-owned businesses, making it a great cause to support.
Closing Racial and Wealth Gaps
Another reason why you should support local black-owned businesses is that in doing so, you are supporting the closing of racial and wealth gaps in your area.
On average, African American individuals have smaller mean wages when compared to caucasian people. Unfortunately, this trend may not be going away in the short term, meaning many people should start supporting more equal salaries.
In addition, small businesses (such as restaurants, banks, Realty firms, etc.) are strong wealth builders in a community that works to increase business, productivity, and earnings for everyone in the area (not just the single black family who runs them).
For these reasons, you should support black-owned businesses due to their power to close local racial and wealth gaps.
Strengthen Local Business
Going along with the idea of supporting your community in general, supporting black-owned businesses can also, in turn, support the local economy of your area.
It has been shown that most purchases within small business-dominated communities tend to recirculate, causing every business in the area to be supported as a whole. With this, it can be clear to say that you are supporting your local economy as a whole by supporting black businesses.
Creating And Supporting New Jobs
Another benefit of supporting small black-owned businesses is that you also support the local job market in your area.
Over time, as businesses are supported and valued by a community, they tend to grow, increase in size, and eventually, need new employees.
This demand for employees creates new jobs within the area that can be available to anyone. Not only does this support the job market as a whole, but it also opens up new jobs that could be more widely available as compared to those in large corporate market stores.
In addition, if you are supporting a slightly larger black-owned business, you are also supporting the jobs that have been created for individuals in your community who need them.
Community Culture
In addition to supporting your community, in supporting black-owned businesses, you are also supporting black culture, and the culture of your community as a whole.
This supports trends to foster positive feelings about your community, bringing people together while also supporting business.
Publicity
With any popular business (black or white-owned), they tend to quickly gain customers, support, and publicity as they interact with their customers. Therefore, in supporting black-owned businesses specifically, you are bringing publicity to their business, which can further support them in the future.
In addition to this, you are bringing publicity to all of the other problems, such as job openings, wage inequality, race inequality, etc. In other words, by doing the little action of supporting a black-owned business, you are really influencing others, which can do a lot.
Positive Representation
In addition to all of these other reasons, supporting black-owned businesses brings positive representation to communities that have historically had a negative stigma.
In our recent history, African American individuals have gotten negative publicity that can sway their public’s image of them. With this, by supporting black-owned businesses, you are actively working to create a positive public image of them, generating more public interest and interaction.
How To Support Black-Owned Businesses
Now that we know the many reasons why black-owned businesses are great and why you should support them, you can now focus on the various ways to support them.
As with most things, there are many ways in which you can support black-owned businesses, each having its own degree of effort and power involved.
Visibility
One of the best ways to support black-owned businesses is through visibility. There are a few small ways to help increase visibility, all of which center around the idea of positively endorsing businesses.
One good way to increase visibility is to simply shop at whatever business you wish to support and use their products in your everyday life. In doing so, you both support the business with your dollar and support visibility of the business within your area.
Another way to increase visibility is to organize or support any local functions where the business is involved. This can mean local fairs, holidays, or anything where the business can get their name and products out to the general public. In doing so, you can easily generate more visibility for the business that you want to support.
Communicate and Find What They Need
One great way to support local businesses is to communicate with them and find out what they need. To do so, you can send them an email, call them, or simply walk in the store and strike up a conversation.
Communication is one of the strongest tools a business can have, so reaching out a hand to start a line of communication can heavily support a business.
In addition, in finding what might help a black-owned business, you can then have a better idea of what you can do to support them.
Word of Mouth
Word of mouth can also have a very strong impact on local businesses. Compared to other forms of advertisement, more analog means such as word of mouth and fliers tend to pique people’s interests.
By doing this, you can set the black-owned business apart, making it more appealing to local customers who may not have gone there on their own.
In addition, word of mouth is one of the easiest forms of advertisement for businesses, as it only takes you mentioning it in conversation, compared to other means of support that could require additional promotional effort.
Shop With Them
While it may seem obvious, one of the best ways to support your local black-owned business is to simply shop with them.
This means that you should support them by purchasing their products or using their services regularly. By doing so, you can easily develop a lasting relationship with them, while giving them natural financial and advertising services.
To sum up, shopping can be one of the easiest ways to support black-owned businesses. In addition, doing so also works to support all local businesses, your local economy, and much more!
Support Black-Owned Businesses Today!
In the end, black-owned businesses are surprisingly important to the culture and integrity of a given region. There are many reasons why you should support them, such as their function to close the race/wage gaps, and because supporting them improves the local economy.
In addition to this, there are many ways to support them, such as by giving publicity and word-of-mouth advertising. But, in the end, always remember to support what you believe in, and that your dollar can be one of the most powerful tools to do so!
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