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Eileen McCormick, store manager of Green Apple Books on Clement Street, was surprised to receive an email from the local merchant association promoting San Francisco’s Small Business Week. Major sponsor? Amazon, the corporate behemoth that helped kill independent bookstores and other small businesses.
Like Coca-Cola promoting Diabetes Awareness Week or Exxon Oil promoting an event focused on addressing climate change, it fell on deaf ears.
What’s worse? The email invited her to attend events called “How to Get Started Selling on Amazon” and “Amazon Small Business Panel.”
“It’s in incredibly poor taste,” McCormick told me. “It’s an insult. It’s so funny.”
When the manager of Green Apple Books on Clement Street learned that San Francisco’s Small Business Week was sponsored by Amazon, she described it as a killer for small businesses.
Yalonda M. James / ChronicleThe San Francisco Chamber of Commerce hosts San Francisco Small Business Week, which ends today. A website promoting the week hails Amazon as the “champion of small business,” with an article extolling its virtues. “Amazon strives to be Earth’s customer-centric company, Earth’s best employer and Earth’s safest place to work,” he says.
Uh-uh.
Rodney Fong, the local chamber’s president and CEO, did not return requests for comment on the sponsor’s selection or questions about how much Amazon paid for the rights. A council spokesman said Fong was too busy to speak. It’s not the first time big businesses have supported Small Business Week; A big sponsor last year was Meta, Facebook’s new name.
Amazon spokeswoman Kelsey Friedrich said the company is proud to have nearly 500,000 small and medium-sized businesses selling products on its site.
“Partnering with local organizations like the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce is one of the ways we help create new opportunities for the small business community,” said Friedrich.
Of course, Amazon’s sponsorship is just the latest aggravation for those trying to run small businesses in San Francisco, which has never been particularly friendly to them, but lately it’s become even more of an epidemic. A new report from the city’s Small Business Commission, with a grant from San Francisco State University’s economics department, reveals the challenges small business owners face — and they’re a long way from Amazon.
The big issues should concern anyone who cares about San Francisco and its future. Small businesses like Green Apple are the heart of the city. Saving them is essential to preserving jobs, the tax base, neighborhood character and happiness.
Store manager Eileen McCormick helps a customer at Green Apple Books in San Francisco. Amazon’s sponsorship of San Francisco’s Small Business Week is “incredibly weak,” she says. It’s an insult. It’s so funny.”
Yalonda M. James / ChronicleAn online survey in eight languages was sent to the city’s small businesses last fall, and 802 people responded. A 152-page report examining the results — including one-on-one interviews with some small business owners — has been released, and the landscape is grim.
When asked whether San Francisco is “generally a good place to own a small business,” 53% would not. Only 22% said yes, and the rest were neutral. Black and Middle Eastern small business owners said the city was not a good place to own a small business.
Eighty-seven percent of respondents said the pandemic has hurt their business, with many citing inflation, declining customer base, inability to hire new workers, supply chain disruptions, dirty streets and lack of parking, among other concerns.
When asked if they were struggling with increased public safety concerns, 39% said disruptive road behavior had affected their business and 20% said their stores had been hit by shoplifting. 60 percent said their businesses were affected by some type of crime in the past year, and most said they were affected more than once.
When asked what solutions could help them thrive, respondents overwhelmingly supported police patrolling commercial neighborhoods on foot or by bike and more non-police community ambassadors monitoring street behavior. 56 percent said street activation — such as parks, outdoor dining, slow streets and public art — would help.
In interviews, small business owners talked about greedy landlords, the city’s strict pandemic laws that keep businesses closed longer than elsewhere, and the high cost of living and lack of affordable housing that have made it difficult to hire workers. They cited street misery, high taxes, bureaucracy, a lack of police response and the slow recovery of downtown.
A Green Apple Books manager says Amazon is slowly killing independent small businesses.
Yalonda M. James / Chronicle“All the benefits in San Francisco (tourists, conventions, lots of residents who like to go out) were lost during the pandemic and are slow to come back,” said one small business owner.
Another respondent said, “We’ve been broke three times. It cost us about $20,000 once. We had many windows broken,” he said.
“As a small business owner, I’m heartbroken in San Francisco,” said another.
Small Business Commission President Cynthia Huey said the report found the city could help small businesses by making its streets cleaner and safer, making it easier to get permits and lowering fees.
“The city could do a better job of taking those ideas seriously,” she said.
Slowly, the city is making progress – in some areas, anyway. Jeff Cretan, a spokesman for Mayor of London Braden, said Prop H would benefit 3,520 projects to facilitate the reopening of small businesses by the end of 2020. As of March 2022, two new small business licensees in the city have worked together on 1,087 cases, he said.
But Huey pointed out that the job of saving our small businesses also falls to San Franciscans.
“We really have to go out and shop,” she said. And try different environments.
In other words, don’t turn to Amazon when your local hardware store, boutique, or independent bookstore offers similar items. Vanessa Martini, a buyer for Green Apple Books, said people who live in urban areas like the Richmond District can definitely avoid Amazon.
“It’s learned helplessness in many clients,” she said. “Amazon has taught them that this is how you buy and buy, but it’s not. There are many other options.”
Cora lands on the ground during a visit to Green Apple Books.
Yalonda M. James / ChronicleMcCormick says Green Apple is doing well because its customers have rallied to support it, but she knows that’s not true for many small businesses. She and Martini had just returned from the annual book conference, where much of the talk focused, she said, on “how do you survive when Amazon is breathing down your neck and threatening you at every turn?”
She said San Franciscans should remember to shop local and avoid Amazon if they want to keep the small businesses they love and their neighborhoods thriving.
“It’s about making conscious decisions to make the people around you and the communities around you stronger,” she said. “You must not surrender.”
Contact Heather Knight: hknight@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @hknightsf
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