Small Business Saturday
Debate between Stephen Mosley and Mark Hunter(9 years, 5 months ago)
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Stephen Mosley
My hon. Friend has got to the nub of the debate. As well as highlighting small business Saturday, the debate is about highlighting the support that is available for small businesses across the country. I will talk later in my speech about what the Government are doing. I am sure that the Minister is quite capable of banging the drum and telling us all about the good work that he and the Government have done to support small businesses.
Mark Hunter (Cheadle) (LD)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. He is being generous with his time, and I hope that he gets the opportunity to proceed more quickly. I put it to him that although small business Saturday is massively important and a very healthy thing—that is why we are all here to support it—we really need communities across the length and breadth of the country to understand the need to support their local shops all year round. Small business Saturday is a welcome initiative, but by itself it is not enough. Retailers on the high street face a great deal of challenge, and we need to get more people to support local shops on a regular basis. Does my hon. Friend agree with me on that point? I hope that he will have the opportunity to say what more we can all do—not just the Government—collectively to support our local small businesses.
Stephen Mosley
I support what the hon. Gentleman says. He raises the points that I wanted to raise in my conclusion, so he is denying me all the glory of raising those issues myself.
By working together, local communities, local groups and local businesses can boost their small shops and therefore boost their local area. One of the most inspiring, exciting and successful ideas for doing that is small business Saturday. Simply, small business Saturday exists to support, inspire and promote small businesses. It started in the United States of America in 2010, and it has been a key feature of the pre-Christmas shopping period and become established on the first Saturday after Thanksgiving. Small business Saturday was conceived, launched and is still heavily backed by American Express, with the intention of encouraging shoppers to patronise small, local bricks-and-mortar businesses.
In America small business Saturday has been heavily promoted via a nationwide radio and television advertising campaign, with a heavy focus on social media that has generated more than 1 million Facebook likes and hundreds of thousands of tweets using the Twitter hashtags #SmallBusinessSaturday and #SmallBizSaturday. Many politicians and business groups in the US have backed the campaign, with many launching campaigns in their local area. Last weekend, on small business Saturday in the US, President Obama and his daughters, Malia and Sasha, went shopping at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington DC, where they picked up 17 books. Additionally, many small business owners in the US have started to run marketing specials on small business Saturday to capitalise on the boost in foot and online traffic, as most customers at this time of year are actively shopping for the Christmas period.