Like many small retailers, Rachel Averbuck counts on local customers for help in the battle with huge e-commerce companies.
As a small business owner, this holiday season I am up against an Amazon with unlimited resources and insane reach. Our little shoe store is old school, we measure feet and sit‐and‐fit our clients for top-notch comfort shoes. Nothing too sexy or slick about us.
Amazon and Zappos have entire departments specializing in social media, inventory management, algorithms to prompt you to buy more. At our store, we do it all ourselves, with a few people wearing many hats. we specialize in face‐to‐face, contact and we’ve leaned into new ways of connecting with our customers and community.
We hustled up a website although we had sworn we’d never sell online, we figured out how to fit shoes over FaceTime, and created plexiglass protection zones to keep us all safe.
If you want stores like ours to be around, if you want to browse in bookshops, or touch and sit on furniture before you buy it, now is the time to join the battle against the all‐powerful Internet Gods.