Eileen McCormick, the store manager of Green Apple Books on Clement Street, was stunned when she received an email from her local merchants’ association promoting San Francisco’s Small Business Week. A main sponsor? Amazon, the corporate behemoth that’s helped kill independent bookstores and other small businesses.
It was as tone deaf as Coca-Cola sponsoring Diabetes Awareness Week or Exxon Oil promoting an event centered on addressing climate change.
Worse yet? The email invited her to attend events titled “How to Start Selling in Amazon’s Store” and “Amazon Small Business Panel.”
“It’s in incredibly poor taste,” McCormick told me. “It’s insulting. It’s ridiculous.”
The manager of Green Apple Books on Clement Street says she was alarmed to learn that San Francisco’s Small Business Week is sponsored by Amazon despite its reputation as a killer of small businesses.
The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce organizes San Francisco Small Business Week, which concludes today. The website promoting the week hails Amazon as a “small business champion” with a paragraph describing its supposed virtues. “Amazon strives to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, Earth’s best employer and Earth’s safest place to work,” it reads.
Uh-huh.
Rodney Fong, president and CEO of the local chamber, didn’t return requests for comment on the off-putting choice of sponsor or answer questions about how much Amazon paid for the privilege. A spokesperson for the chamber said Fong was too busy to talk. It’s not the first time big businesses have sponsored Small Business Week; a big sponsor last year was Meta, the new name for Facebook.
Kelsey Friedrich, a spokesperson for Amazon, 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 just one of the ways we help create new opportunities for the small business community,” Friedrich said.
Of course, Amazon’s sponsorship is just the latest aggravation for people trying to run small businesses in San Francisco, a city that has never been particularly friendly to them, but has lately seen even more pandemic-fueled hardship. A new report from the city’s small business commission with help from San Francisco State University’s economics department lays bare the challenges facing small business owners — and they stretch far beyond Amazon.
The massive issues should concern anybody who cares about San Francisco and its future. Small businesses like Green Apple are the beating heart of the city. Saving them is essential to preserving jobs, a tax base, neighborhood character — and joy.
Store manager Eileen McCormick helps a customer at Green Apple Books in San Francisco. She says Amazon’s sponsorship of San Francisco’s Small Business Week is “in incredibly poor taste. It’s insulting. It’s ridiculous.”
An online survey in eight languages was sent to the city’s small business owners last fall, and 802 people responded. A 152-page report tallying the results — plus responses from one-on-one interviews with some small business owners — has been released, and the landscape is grim.
Asked whether they think San Francisco “is generally a good place to own a small business,” 53% said no. Just 22% said yes, and the rest were neutral. Black and Middle Eastern small business owners were the most likely to say the city isn’t a good place to own a small business.
Eighty-seven percent of respondents said the pandemic had hurt their business, with many citing inflation, a shrinking customer base, the inability to hire new employees, supply chain interruptions, dirty streets and a lack of parking among other concerns.
Asked whether they’ve struggled with increased public safety concerns, 39% said disruptive street behavior has affected their business and 20% said their stores have been hit by shoplifting. Sixty percent said their businesses have been hit by some kind of crime in the past year, and most of those said they’d been hit more than once.
Asked what solutions could help them thrive, respondents overwhelmingly supported more police patrolling commercial neighborhoods on foot or bicycle and more non-police community ambassadors monitoring street behavior. Fifty-six percent said street activation — like parklets, outdoor dining, slow streets and public art — would help.
In interviews, small business owners talked about greedy landlords, the city’s strict pandemic rules that kept businesses closed longer than elsewhere and the cost of living and lack of affordable housing making it hard to hire workers. They also cited street misery, high taxes, bureaucracy, lack of police response and the slow recovery of downtown.
The manager of Green Apple Books says Amazon is slowly killing independent, small businesses.
“All of the advantages of being in San Francisco (tourists, conventions, lots of residents who like going out) virtually disappeared during the pandemic and are slow to return,” one small business owner said.
Another respondent said, “We’ve been broken into three times. One time cost us almost $20,000. We’ve had numerous windows broken.”
“As a small business owner, I’m broken-hearted by San Francisco,” still another said.
Cynthia Huie, president of the small business commission, said the report confirmed the city can help small businesses by making its streets cleaner and safer, making it easier to get permits and slashing fees.
“The city could do a better job at taking those thoughts more seriously,” she said.
Slowly, the city is making progress — in some areas, anyway. Jeff Cretan, spokesperson for Mayor London Breed, said that since the passage of Prop. H to streamline the opening of small businesses in the fall of 2020, 3,520 projects have benefitted. Two new small business permit specialists in the city have together worked on 1,087 cases since March 2022, he added.
But Huie pointed out the job of saving our small businesses falls to regular San Franciscans too.
“We just really need to come out and shop,” she said. “And try different neighborhoods.”
In other words, don’t automatically turn to Amazon when your local hardware store, boutique or independent bookstore offers the same goods. Vanessa Martini, a buyer at Green Apple Books, said people living in urban neighborhoods like the Richmond district can certainly avoid Amazon.
“It’s a learned helplessness in a lot of customers,” she told me. “Amazon has taught them that this is how you shop and buy, but it’s not. There are so many other options.”
Kora rests on the floor during a visit to Green Apple Books.
McCormick said Green Apple is faring well because its customers have rallied to support it, but she knows that’s not true for a lot of small businesses. She and Martini just got back from an annual book conference where much of the chatter centered on, as she put it, “How do you survive when Amazon is breathing down your neck and threatening you at every moment?”
She said San Franciscans should remember that if they want their favorite small businesses to make it and their neighborhoods to thrive, they need to shop locally and avoid Amazon.
“It’s about making conscious decisions to make the people around you and the community around you stronger,” she said. “You don’t have to give in.”
Reach Heather Knight: hknight@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @hknightsf
