Earlier this month I laid out my plans for Storefront Revolt this year, and what you could expect from both the regular free newsletter and upgrading to a paid subscription. But in that post I neglected to mention anything about the constitutional crisis that’s happening in the U.S. right now, so I wanted to take a minute to break for current events, and to explain how I’m planning to address them as both a business owner, and as someone who writes about owning a business.

A lot of us, myself included, are justifiably freaked out about our country’s sudden turn toward authoritarianism. It’s not like the United States hasn’t been shifting to oligarchy/surveillance state/erosion of individual rights for decades now, so is this moment something we should react to differently? If so, how? And if yes, what type of response is warranted, or effective, in this rapidly changing governmental and political climate, particularly from owners of storefront businesses?

Yeah, this moment is different

Speaking as someone who worked for small businesses during 9/11, the Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, and the first Trump presidency, and as someone who owned a business during COVID, the murder of George Floyd, the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and the Supreme Court Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, I’ve had a front row seat to how small businesses have navigated all sorts of American crises. But this second Trump presidency, and the immediate shifts in policy and tone of governance that have come with it, are beyond anything I have ever experienced.

I think anyone with a basic public high school education can draw parallels between what is happening in the U.S. now and, say, the lead up to past global conflicts such as the “rise in nationalism”—as we all learned to pen for our S.A.T. essay questions—prior to the first world war. And more parallels are drawn for us in the daily news, as when this December, 2024 Gallup poll was released which indicated Americans’ trust in the objectivity of their judiciary system had experienced a globally significant drop that mirrors sentiment typically occurring prior to historic socioeconomic collapses, civil wars, or military coups.

It also feels like mass resistance is conspicuously absent this time around, indicating that while this is all certainly fucked up, we’re just resigned to fucked up now. The media, pretty much owned by the 1 percent at this point, might be resistant to contextualizing challenges to our democracy as alarming because they’re wary of being sued by Donald Trump.

So yeah, I would say we are entering a different phase of government, unlike any we have experienced. While it is about the dismantling of the Small Business Administration, it’s not just about the dismantling of the SBA. While it is about tariffs, it’s not just about tariffs. While it is about the upcoming Tax Cuts and Jobs Act legislation, it’s not just about the TCJA. It’s about all these things, plus the rise of a fascist, plutocratic kleptocracy in place of our (however imperfect) democracy.

So what, then, is a storefront business owner’s duty to respond in this crisis, if any?

You may feel that, because it’s not like we can single handedly overthrow the oligarchy through our actions as Main Street shop owners, we should continue about our daily lives and hope someone in charge does something to stop all this.

You may find yourself in the position of asking, “What is there to even do?”

So, what type of response is warranted?

As small business owners, we have obligations to our employees, our vendors, our immediate neighbors, and of course, ourselves and our families. Our first necessary response to these sweeping changes is to understand if we, as business owners and employers, have the power to minimize any potential negative impacts of these executive orders on those we have obligations to in our community. Whether it’s the potential for ICE raids or tariffs, we should respond by knowing as much as we can as fast as we can, so we can stay in business, keep paying people, and protect our immediate community from the negative impacts of illegal executive orders. That is our primary and perhaps only obligation in the immediate, and that alone is really difficult right now because of how fast everything is changing.

This means we cannot hide from the news cycle, as tempting as that may be.

Posting on Instagram doesn’t do anything

Some of us might have sizable social media followings, which gives us some degree of influence on social and political issues within our community. Does it help to express vocal opposition to the flurry of executive orders, the Project 2025 Plan, the continued erosion of abortion rights, or the genocide in Gaza by posting something to Instagram? Is it warranted to show where we stand, to somehow demonstrate that we’re not silent on these issues?

How small businesses use social media to communicate political dissent is a giant topic, one that could take up an entire separate post. But here is my hot take for the moment.

To the degree that you, as a shop owner, can amplify resistance that contains a call to action, do it. For example, if organizers are trying to get the word out about the 50501 Presidents Day protests in your city, share that information. If a civil rights organization shares a graphic showing how to resist an ICE raid, especially if they are happening where you live or they threaten your suppliers, share that graphic. If a local group is organizing a petition to make your city a sanctuary city, share it. But if you are not an organizer or directly impacted, how you feel about all that is happening right now doesn’t matter. You don’t need to post a personal essay explaining that you’re upset by what’s happening, especially if you’re coupling that message with the admission that you feel powerless and don’t know what to do. That is performative activism, because while the message is there, it doesn’t go anywhere, it doesn’t have legs. It’s just a flag that says, “I feel this, too!”

Engaging in this type of performative messaging may allow us to believe we’re standing up to something simply by posting something, like we’ve done enough for the day when we’ve really done nothing. I’m sure we have ALL participated in this form of public hand-wringing, myself included! There’s no shame in it. It was basically required of small businesses during COVID. I’m giving us collective permission to turn away from this tactic if it isn’t serving us any more, because it is simply the illusion of power or control where none actually exists. Our “social influence” only happens on a platform controlled and monetized by oligarchs. Here we are, pledging our allegiance to the resistance, or arguing over who is more perfectly antiracist, on a channel that gets richer—and better at influencing elections—the more we argue.

What type of response is actually effective?

Strip away everything I could ever ask of my government—universal healthcare, a raise in the federal minimum wage, fair taxes on the rich, affordable housing, federally subsidized childcare—it all seems like a pipe dream right now. If there is one thing, one thing I could ask my government to provide me at a bare minimum, as a business owner, it would be this: predictability.

Our work as small business owners is to anticipate, plan for, and react to whatever is on the horizon. Predictability means you can anticipate events far into the future, with enough lead time to prepare, adjust, and plan contingencies. Even if things are predictably terrible, as they have been for a long time, we can plan for them.

Since Trump has taken office, predictability has disintegrated. His embracing of the Project 2025 policy agenda has laid the groundwork—already in motion—for a total takeover of our government by plutocrats, with no regard for what regular people on the ground need to maintain a functioning society.

This is why you, as a small business owner, should be angry. And while there are certainly two dozen other reasons to be enraged about what is happening to our “democracy” right now, if we want to do anything about it for the next four years (and, I would argue, for the rest of our lives), we need to start coming together as business owners around a common problem.

Asking for predictability from your government is incredibly pragmatic. It’s something we can all rally around no matter what our other political affiliations are. If we can tie “predictability” to stopping this administration from doing crazy shit, let’s do it. If we can also tie it to enacting progressive policies, let’s take it a step further. We’re not coming together to overthrow Trump, we’re coming together to demand a predictable, stable economic environment to conduct business in.

But first, we have to come together.

This one old trick called collective organizing

Without collective action, we’ll never be able to influence actual policy, even if we collectively have a billion followers. Why? Because unlike posting to social media, collective organizing starts with a goal. We need to stop flailing around in resistance to things we don’t like and start organizing movements to enact the progressive policies that would make it easier to start and run small businesses in the United States, and our own states and towns.

What I can contribute as an individual is minuscule compared to what I can contribute as a business owner, because when I join with other business owners we build collective power, and that is the best chance we have at enacting change. It is from collective power that legislation happens, media campaigns are funded, lawsuits are filed, votes are gotten out, mutual aid is organized. Social media is often the most visible layer of grassroots organizing, but it is simply that: a layer. It is not grassroots organizing in and of itself. Grassroots organizing—the only thing that really ever has brought about effective social change—happens in real life, through face to face conversation, through tiny conflicts and resolutions with people who disagree about a lot of things but agree about one thing—the one thing they are trying to make a difference by changing.

What’s even more impactful? Small business ownership also happens to be brilliantly bi-partisan.

In the United States, everyone loves a small business owner. We’re job creators! We are the engine of the economy. We are the backbone of our communities. We are the innovators, the go-getters, and the embodiment of the American dream. We are right up there with teachers, veterans, and nurses in the hierarchy of unassailable respectability from both sides of the political aisle. This is a great power.

Yet unlike teachers and nurses, we’re bad at collective organizing on the issues that impact us directly.

It makes sense why. Not only have we been duped into thinking our “influence” only happens on social channels owned by billionaires and is limited to our numbers of followers, we’re ruggedly individual, really busy, and not unionized. We’re not joiners or we would be working for other people. We work alone so we have only ourselves to blame if we’re just scraping by, unsure if it’s our fault or a systemic issue.

Unlike veterans—also not unionized—small business owners have mostly neglected to join the organizations that exist to bring us together: chambers, business district organizations, professional associations. Real organizing involves things like going to boring meetings, paying close attention to state and local elections, and talking to strangers face to face. It’s excruciating, it’s slow, it’s way outside of everyone’s comfort zone, and success is often incremental, with no clear pay-off.

Many of the organizations that already exist to bring business owners together have been doing organizing work for decades already. If you want to get some real work done in this administration and for the rest of your tenure as a small business owner and activist, join something. Find the closest, most immediate organization that does legislative or organizing work on behalf of small businesses in your community and start going to their meetings. Sign up for their emails! Attend their Zoom trainings. Volunteer.

Why joining something is the best work you can do

Our best chance at influence is organizing under the collective identity of small business ownership around issues that impact our profit margins, our ability to hire, our ability to innovate, our ability to thrive.

This doesn’t mean we are neglecting to address social issues that don’t directly impact our bottom line. By organizing collectively as small business owners, we are building coalitions of power through face to face grassroots organizing that can then be relied on for mobilization around any issue.

Joining something local also teaches you how to organize in the first place. People aren’t born knowing how to be effective organizers, it is a learned skill. A lot of small business organizations, especially chambers and national associations, will literally train you how to advocate for your interests and influence policy agenda through specific trainings on how to talk to media and lawmakers.

You can also use the organizations you join to gain audiences with influential policymakers you wouldn’t be able to access as an individual. A local rep may not answer your one-off email, but they might attend a meeting of dozens of business owners in their district.

When you join something, you are forced to work in community with people you might disagree with on other issues, to learn how to work together on something even if you are opposed on something else.

When you’re building a long, slow movement around policies that impact your business versus reacting to every crazy thing a racial administration puts out there, you will probably have an easier time hanging in there for the long haul versus disbanding once the immediate threat dissipates.

Today I encourage you to take the first step in building a more sustainable, long-term approach to organizing based on building relationships with other business owners who share a common interest, then using that base of power to build coalitions with other groups who share that interest, not just business owners.

Remember I said at the top of this post that I would explain how I would address current events as both a business owner and as someone who writes about business? Let me finally give you some examples of what I am doing in my role as a small business owner to get involved and do exactly what it is I am talking about here.

How I am getting involved personally

I used to be more of a social media crybaby. I thought I was doing my part by posting my thoughts about national politics and social issues to Instagram. When I cried on social media about the state of things, sometimes the internet loved me, and sometimes they threatened to cancel me. None of it mattered, because it had no long-term political or social impact.

Then a car crashed into my business.

When the car crashed into my business, I thought I could be an Instagram crybaby about it, and the internet would love me, and the city would take action. I wanted protective bollards installed outside my shop, but the city wasn’t going to install them just because I was complaining to 11,000 Tacomans on Instagram. Someone did reach out to me who worked for a local active transportation organization, however, to school me in how things really get done, and gave me a list of the long series of steps I would have to take to work toward addressing pedestrian safety issues outside my shop. Now my eyes were open.

In an effort to start my long fight against the bureaucracy and get bollards installed, I started going to a lot of district and city meetings. At one of these meetings, someone in the city planning department asked me to volunteer in a corridor safety audit in my district, which I did. Soon after, I joined the board of our local business district association, because I was already going to all the meetings, and some of the older business owners who had run things for the past couple decades were retiring.

As a board member of my business district, I elected to attend the Washington Main Street conference in 2024. There, I realized that businesses in Tacoma, Spokane, and Seattle, Washington’s three biggest cities, are shut out of the Washington state Main Streets program. Tacoma only has business district designations, which means if businesses in any district in Tacoma want support from the city, we have to organize on our own. This isn’t easy when, as I stated before, business owners aren’t typical joiners. As if we were single handedly trying to prove Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone hypothesis—that American social capital has declined due to decreased civic engagement, which leads to diminished collective action—membership in the South Tacoma Business District Association has been decimated by a wave of retiring Boomers who are not being replaced by young upstart business owners. The board keeps shrinking, except for myself and one other business owner under 50 (who also happens to be the guy whose family owns 60% of the buildings in the district).

I find myself in the position of having joined a declining organization in the hopes that I might be able to help reinvigorate it, then realizing how much work that’ll take on top of everything else on my plate, then realizing that while I had that realization, the organization shrunk further, and now I’m saddled with more organizational obligation plus the inability to step away because if I do, no one will remain to keep it going. (This is basically every PTSA in the country, I realize.)

Business district associations are a lot like PTSAs, actually. They rely on volunteers (read: no full-time paid admins) from the group of people they serve. Like PTSAs, many beneficiaries of the services (and potential volunteers) don’t understand what the organization does. I am committed to staying put in my VP role in my business district because I know how essential we are, even when business owners who are reluctant to join don’t.

So that’s what I’m doing as a business owner to address current events: joining my local business district association and working at a grassroots level to rebuild the membership. Do I think this is going to stop Donald Trump and Elon Musk from decimating the SBA? Not one bit! I’m doing this at 44 so that when I am 54, I have a broader base of knowledge and experience to draw upon, and a bigger list of contacts I can activate with a single text, to make bigger impacts.

What I am doing as someone who writes about small business is to write about what the “revolt” part of Storefront Revolt looks like for me. Expect some posts about that tedious, excruciating work!

I also want to highlight someone else’s revolt path that I just learned about… on Instagram of all places. Molly Moon Neitzel, CEO of Molly Moon’s Homemade Ice Cream in Seattle, was an invited witness at a House Committee on Small Business hearing on February 5, 2025. She appeared to be the only Democratic witness at this hearing and she was being absolutely grilled by spineless Republican reps who were clearly using “helping small business owners” as a platform to further the Trump/Musk agenda.

Among all the other things she said during this hearing, as she advocated for universal healthcare and childcare as part of the Main Street Alliance’s agenda, the singular stand-out moment was when, under tremendous pressure from a leading and partisan question about why Elon Musk shouldn’t be able to make sweeping cuts to programs, Molly Moon Neitzel cooly stated into the microphone:

“He’s not been confirmed by Congress.”

Real change means spending a decade grinding away in an organization, only to ensure that when you speak six extemporaneous words at a Congressional hearing, and your heart is racing and your hands and voice are shaking, those six words come out without hesitation, and are irrefutably correct. Please join me in slow clapping for Molly Moon Neitzel and getting out from behind your desk to join whatever it is she’s doing to keep the lights on for all of us. (Hint: for Molly Moon Neitzel it’s the Main Street Alliance, and I highly recommend checking them out.)

Let that moment be part of your fuel and inspiration for the long work ahead.