The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Saving Main Street: Small Business in the Time of COVID-19 by Gary Rivlin

Episode Date: October 20, 2022

Saving Main Street: Small Business in the Time of COVID-19 by Gary Rivlin A veteran journalist follows an inspiring ensemble cast of small business owners fighting to keep their businesses alive through Covid-19, while exploring the sweeping trends and government policies that had brought small businesses to the breaking point long before the coronavirus hit. There is a tendency to fetishize small business even as it shrinks before our eyes. Americans extol the virtues of small, local, often family-run shops, yet buy from big-box retailers and chains that dominate the competition. Even before the pandemic, small businesses seemed endangered. When Covid-19 hit, the resounding question was: How will they be able to survive this? Saving Main Street is an unfiltered, up-close examination of a small group of business owners and their employees, their struggles, and their strategies to survive. It is an eye-opening tale of grit, perseverance, and entrepreneurial spirit that follows three businesses: a restaurant owner and his rambunctious staff, an immigrant running her own hair salon, and the owner of a “non-life sustaining” gift shop—alongside a larger cast of vividly drawn characters. Gary Rivlin focuses on the first days of the Covid lockdown and the ensuing eighteen months of chaos, including the personal and financial risks, a contentious presidential election, and contradictory governmental guidelines—all which compounded the everyday challenges of running an independent business trying to attract and retain customers who expect low prices, convenience, and endless choice. Rivlin keenly observes small businesses from all angles, examining commonly held “myths”; contradictions in government policy; enormous racial and class fissures; a national self-identity intrinsically connected to the ideal of small business, and how the decline of this American way of retail impacts our notions of American exceptionalism, community, and civic duty. As Rivlin reveals, there’s something enduring about small business in the American psyche. Life will have changed in unprecedented ways on the other side of this pandemic, yet hard times will also create opportunities, offering hope and survival.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. From thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. For 13 years, we just keep it coming at you. And maybe someday I can quit singing the intro.

Every time I give it up, I get hate mail that says, stop singing or start singing the stupid thing. And, of course, when people run up to me in public and events and stuff, they always run up and scream, it's the Chris Voss Show. I don't know, whatever. I guess everybody's got to have a freaking hook or a bit or whatever the hell it is. We seriously stopped it. And people were calling me from Canada and stuff going, you can't stop that.

And I'm like, it was a bit for a week. But there it is. Anyway, guys, we certainly appreciate you guys having me on the show. We have an amazing Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, author of nine books. We're going to be talking to him today about his amazing new book that's coming hot off the presses. You can get it wherever fine books are sold. Stay away from the alleyway bookstores because you might need a tetanus shot if you go in there. You might get mugged.

I got mugged in an alleyway one the other day. It was called Tarns and Bobble. It clearly was not the brand Barnes & Noble. I don't know. That's horrible. Tarns and Bobble. Clearly was not the brand Barnes and Noble. I don't know. That's a horrible... That's like the best I can do with an improv joke. This is what we do at the beginning of the show, people. We just make stuff up. Anyway, guys, the part we aren't making up is you should

invite your family and friends to go to the show. YouTube.com, ForrestS.ChrisFoss, Goodreads.com, ForrestS.ChrisFoss. See all of our groups. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, all the crazy places the kids are at nowadays. He is, as I mentioned before, or teased, as the

shows like to call it, the author of the newest book coming out October 18th, 2022, Saving Main Street, Small Business in the Time of COVID-19. You may have heard of this COVID-19 stuff. It's kind of been a thing this last few years here.

Gary Rivlin is on the show with us today. Gary, did I get your last name pronounced correctly? You did. There you go. I took a guest stab at that. I normally try and clear that before the show, but it's Monday, so there you go. Kerry Rivlin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and author of nine books. Where does he find the time?

Including Katrina, After the Flood. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, Fortune, GQ. We've never had anybody on the show from GQ. We should get someone on the show from there. Wired, among other publications, he is a two-time Gerald Loeb? You got it. There you go. And former reporter for the New York Times. He lives in New York with his wife, theater director Daisy Walker, and two sons. Welcome to the show, Gary. How are you? I'm doing all right. Thanks for having me. There you go. I like to just ad-lib through people's bios, and then people are going,

is that really what his bio says? But we have a lot of fun on this show. Infotainment is best. So, Gary, give us a.com or wherever you want people to find you on the interwebs to stalk you. Just my name, Gary Rivlin, R-I-V-L-I-N.com. That's my website. And, of course, the book is available or will be available tomorrow at pretty much all the online and real bookstores. So why are you holding out on people not releasing it today?

I'm just kidding. I know. I just want the demand to be so great. You know, kind of when Nike or when the iPhone comes out, there's lines. So we're just imagining lines and lines of people outside of bookstores. It's that kind of thing. There you go. You want that whole experience like you're Ozzy Osbourne signing books, right? People come in to buy the CD. Anyway, Gary, so you've written a lot of books and covered a lot of amazing things. In fact, I believe you wrote about the Panama Papers.

Isn't that correct? Oh, that's what I have my little piece of a Pulitzer for. I was one of the reporters on the Panama Papers. That's good. What an amazing, just explosive sort of thing that was. And I think the reverberations are still being felt out there in the world, I think. Yeah, exactly. I always forget if it's the prime minister or president of Iceland stepped down because of it. So this was a dump of like 11 million pages from this panamanian

law firm that just exposed a lot of well-known athletes of vladimir putin uh was hiding some of his money using the the lawyers and so yeah it did have a huge a huge impact you haven't found my money yet because there is none oh well there Well, there's that. And apparently Putin is still in office despite the Panama Papers. That's true. That's true. Probably the richest man in the world. We have a number of Putin authors on the show. Would you guess he's probably the richest man in the world if Forbes were to ever get a hold of everything?

Yeah. I've heard that. It's believable. But there could be dictators in other countries. I don't know. I have heard that. It's believable. But there could be dictators in other countries. I don't know. I have no idea. But it's plausible. It's plausible to me. The dictators in other countries? Are you talking about Elon Musk?

No, I'm just kidding. Let's get to your amazing new book that you're working on here. Give us a brief overview, if you would. Maybe tell us what motivated you to write about this topic. Right. So starting in spring of 2020, there are all these accounts of one fourth of the small businesses in the country are going to go out of business, one third, you know, 40% of independent

restaurants. And I just wanted to follow that. You know, I I, I feared I was going to hit the road and chronicle, you know, this great small business die off. And, you know, the story I found was much more interesting, much more inspiring, not to give away the ending, but there was nowhere near one quarter of the small businesses in America going out nowhere near one third. It upticked a few percentage points in 2020. There was kind of a revival of entrepreneurship in the country. A lot of new business starts. But, you know, really, you know, I was writing about these small business owners, restaurant owner, hair salon, pharmacist, all of them, you know, staring down COVID. But in a way, there's a super strain of entrepreneur.

They've been staring down Amazon or big box stores or chains, dealing with globalization. And, you know, there was, I think what the press missed is that there was a lot more to these small business owners, their fortitude, their grit, their creativity, plus a trillion or so dollars from the U.S. government helped a lot. That did help a lot. And I think there's a lot of, I think it was the out-of-work stuff, the unemployment that got, there's a whole lot of money missing there trying to get to the bottom of a lot of scamsters. So you tell the story about how basically Main Street was able to survive this. I expected the same thing you did.

I expected, you know, downtowns to turn into ghost towns. You know, there was some pain. I mean, a few favorite places of mine. I'm in New York. I'm in New York City. So, you know, a big city where there's a lot of commuter traffic, where there's all these businesses, retailers, but mainly food establishments that cater to a downtown business crowd, obviously they got hurt disproportionately. College towns.

I mean, you know, for an entire year, you had kids in their, you know, childhood bedrooms going to class, not on campus. So I don't want to minimize the thousands of great businesses out there that went out. I'm just saying that, you know, if you look at what was predicted and you look at what happened, like, you know, it's not like there's hard numbers on this, but those who've studied it said that the number of small businesses

that went out of business in 2020 upticked about two or three percentages, you know, percentage points. You know, I mean, you know, something else that's really hard is like small businesses are always going out of business. You know, every year, like eight or nine percent of small businesses go out. I mean, you're crazy to start a small business. You know, it's just like I looked up the stats.

One third go out of business within two years. Half go out of business within five years. And 70 percent are out of business within two years, half go out of business within five years, and 70% are out of business within the decade. And so the odds are stacked against you going in it. But people start businesses, they love to cook, you know, they want to have a beauty salon, you know, whatever it is, or for more pragmatic reasons. I mean, a couple of the small business owners I was following, they want to give themselves a raise, or they want to like kind of, you know, be independent. They didn't want to work for the man.

So, you know, it's sort of like it's a crazy thing to do, but it sort of beats every other alternative. It does. There's a freedom to it. I started my first company when I was 18. I've been through several of these resets. I survived, you know, I built an empire of companies in the brick and mortar age. Empire? Empire?

A little empire. I call it my little empire. Okay. And so we had a collection of companies that we built. And then along came 2008. One of my biggest jewels was the mortgage business. And, you know, we know how that went. And so, you know, you have to reinvent yourself. And so, you know, you have to reinvent yourself. And, yeah, I mean, back when I came up in brick and mortar, the fail rate for a new business in brick and mortar was 99% within the first two years. And now it's a little bit easier.

It's a little more entrepreneuristic, the interwebs. How did you find a lot of these companies survived and adapted to the new challenged environment? You know, it's mixed. Like the restaurant owner, T.J. Cusimano of Cusimano's in Old Forge, Pennsylvania, that's right outside. He just was really creative. You know, he shut down and, you know, I mean, he was ordered shut down by the governor of Pennsylvania. Within two days, he had set up an outdoor market in the porch of his restaurant where, you know, bagged up produce, flour, alcohol. He kind of put in containers his spaghetti sauce, his sauces.

And, you know, that was great. I mean, for him, it meant cash. It meant not throwing away food. And for the town, he's in a town of 8000 people. You know, they needed flour. They needed vegetables. Everyone had to start cooking. Everything. Bread on the shelves. And flour. And well, he he had Italian bread, too. He had focaccia. I mean, you know, you can eat. You can eat well for a week or two if you live near that restaurant. And so that was kind of the first creative thing he did.

And then he just tried a bunch of things. Some worked, some didn't. He tried to do these, like, blue apron, you know, these boxed up food prep kits. And he felt like, oh, okay, everyone's cooking at home. So I'll, you know, dice up the vegetables. I'll put my sauce in and give instructions on how to cook the meat, the chicken, the fish, whatever. That proved a total bust.

I mean, anyone who's going to pay his prices doesn't really want to have to cook it themselves and clean up. So that one didn't work, but, you know, he's usually closed on Monday and Tuesday. So he created Taco Tuesdays, you know, where, you know, he cooked up salsa and meats and tacos and margaritas and margarita mix. And, you know, that did really, really well. Just brought a lot of business into the restaurant. His problem is he's an upscale Italian restaurant.

And, you know, are you getting your risotto kind of a half hour later in some soggy package? His food didn't really travel well the way pizza or, you know, Asian foods would travel. So he had to come up with these other things. He never really liked barbecue. It just was not a taste of his. He's kind of an Italian guy who always cooked and ate Italian food. But he started looking at YouTube videos and taught himself how to barbecue. And every Saturday and Sunday, starting in May, May of 2020, he would have these barbecues and they were a huge success. He sold out every Saturday, every Sunday, and that just brought cash in to the restaurant. So he would kind of pay his mortgage, pay the people, pay his, you know, pass bills.

I mean, if you're a restaurant owner, the top bill on your desk is always your suppliers. Because if you're not paying your suppliers, you're not making any money because you have nothing to cook. And so he had bills from the suppliers. So between, you know, kind of his makeshift grocery store for a couple of weeks. And then these other ways, he was able to survive. And, you know, throughout the pandemic, you know, Pennsylvania, just to get specific about them, they went 50% occupancy in mid-June in his county. Then they decided like, no, we're going to go 25% occupancy. And like, at that point, he said, what's the use of having anyone inside the restaurant at 25%? But then they went back to 50%. But then come December, there was a, an upsurge, they shut down indoor dining, all together, all throughout Pennsylvania with no warning, it was pretty much a shock to people. But you know, he came up with, you know, for Christmas,

you can have turkey and stuffing and these things, you know, for came up with, you know, for Christmas, you can have turkey and stuffing and these things, you know, for New Year's, we'll have our, you know, lobster and, you know, these other treats kind of thing. And he sold thousands, tens of thousands of these prepared dinners. And that helped him survive when he had no other option. I mean, again, he did some takeout. But, you know, once the cold weather came, his patio was worthless. And so he just found a way. And a lot of these businesses, they just found a way. Yeah.

That's the beauty of the entrepreneurial spirit of America and mainstream in itself is the ability. And thank God, entrepreneurism with the Internet, it's much easier to create a company. You know, when I started my companies back in the day. The empire. Yeah, the small little empire, yeah. I think we had, I started with 27 corporations. Really? Yeah, we had a whole group of companies, three core businesses,

and then a whole list of things that we had an interest in. I'm a very, I get very bored. But we did it during brick and mortar. So you start a company, you had to buy a license. You had to buy an office space. You had to furnish it. You had to get the employees in there and answer the phones. You had to spend a lot of money.

You had to work with a phone company and cut a phone deal, $800 a month or whatever it was. You had to do a lot of money. You had to work with a phone company and cut a phone deal, you know, $800 a month or whatever it was. You know, you had to do a lot. But now, you know, you can go online, you can do these online things and it's so much easier and hopefully it's making it easier for people to do entrepreneurism. But, you know, it's... To stick on entrepreneurism, I feel like whenever we talk about entrepreneurialism in this country, it's always Silicon Valley. It's always a.com, excuse me, an internet-based company. And, you know, that's an interesting, interesting story. But the truth is, since the 80s, entrepreneurialism in this country is way down, way down.

Really? With the exception of startups, you know, around technology. And something that was kind of fascinating is there was really, there's been a resurgence since 2020. And on top of that, like, there's a different kind of entrepreneurialism that doesn't really get much attention. That's what I'm talking about. It's, there's, I used to cover Silicon Valley.

I was a tech correspondent for a lot of years for Wired, New York Times. And, you know, a lot of them were small, small businesses, but they were small businesses that intended on being very, very big businesses. You know, here are the businesses I'm writing about, I wrote about, you know, they're happy being five or 10 employee businesses. They just want to make a good living at that. They had no grand plans of having, you know, 20 retail outlets. And, you know, I didn't really know those folks. My dad was a small businessman his whole life, which gets back to an earlier question you asked, what motivated me, you know, I've always, I mean, I had a front row seat of how hard it was. It's definitely a roller coaster of, you know, good times, bad times, recessions, suddenly a competition,

someone quits, you know, there's always something in business. But, you know, seeing the creativity, I gave you the example of TJ Cusumano, just now the restaurant owner, but, you know, in Hazleton, it was a cafe owner. She has a cafe in central Hazleton. It's a city of 30,000. It's a small city, but they have office buildings. And that was clientele, coffee and muffins in the morning, lunch with sandwiches, salads, chili, that kind of stuff in the afternoon. But there were no office workers. What was she going to do? And she was bringing in no money.

I don't mean virtually no money. There were weeks where she brought in nothing. And so she started catering. At first it's like, okay, we want to thank our essential workers. So we'll go to Poppy's Press, that's the name of her cafe, to have them cook up lunch for 20 people. Like, oh, we want to say thank you to the doctors, the hospital staff, whatever. And so she did a little bit of business that way. But now, almost three years later, she's exclusively a caterer. You know, this is concept and technology of the dark kitchen, you know, kind of a restaurant that's a kitchen with no tables kind of thing. And that's what she did. She just used her cafe. And now she's a caterer uh you know she you know caters events weddings whatever um uh but

also you know makes a picnic baskets uh she does these she calls them boards she's like a cutting board and load them with whatever you want muffins you know cheese and crackers you know desserts whatever it is and she has this whole sideline business that's now her main business because she pivoted that's that's the word in silicon valley in technology pivoted you see a lot of pivoting among you know large you know companies you know discord was to let gamers talk to each other but now discord lets all of us talk to each other they pivoted they pivoted but so did these tiny little businesses with two four ten uh employees three brothers in brothers in the Bronx here behind this Kraft chocolate company. 90% of their sales at the start of 2020 were to grocery stores, to small markets, specialty markets.

COVID hit. No one's going to the little cheese shop. No one's going to the little gift store. And, you know, now 50% of their business is online. They sell directly to consumers online. And much of the rest is to corporations. Corporations want to gift baskets to send to their customers to reward their employees kind of thing. Again, time after time, I saw people that just got hit in the jaw. I mean, COVID just shut them down, changed their business model or made it so their business model no longer

worked, and they pivoted. There's a lot of creativity out there, not just around technology. Sounds like you profile a lot of great business owners that Jessa did in the book. Well, you know, I focus, there are three main small business owners, the restaurant owner, a hair salon operator in this town of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, Latina woman, an immigrant, and someone in a rural area who owns a small gift and card shop. But, you know, in telling that story, I weave in the stories of these other small business owners, you know, I met. So you follow throughout the book, you know, their story. I mean, I mean it in a, I meant to write it in a novelistic fashion where you sort of meet these people, there's a challenge, and, you know, they have ups and downs.

They have moments where they think they're going to make it they have moments where they're wondering like the tj the creative restaurant owner things look like they were going great but when he was shut down a second time he took a construction job you know he's just like you know his wife was a waitress at the restaurant they're bringing no money through waitressing he's making no money at the restaurant and so you do what you have to do. In Scranton, Pennsylvania, these two guys who own a wedding facility, you know, kind of a pair of venues where they hold weddings and big corporate get togethers, that kind of thing. You know, their business was down 95% when COVID hit. You know, one was the head of Scranton Tomorrow, you know, one of those civic organizations.

Both were really active in the local chamber of commerce yet to survive. You know, one donned a red vest and started working at Lowe's, you know, as a clerk. And the other one was a picker at a big at a local grocery chain place because they did what they had to do to survive because they wanted this business, which not incidentally in their case, was their entire life savings in these two buildings that they own with their venues. And so, you know, if it's not creativity, it's just kind of this grit that's going to say, I'm going to figure out how to stay open because this is my dream and I don't want to see it end.

To me, that's the beauty of America. I mean, Main Street is the beauty of America. It's the dream of America, I think. You know, I started my first company when I was 18 accidentally, and I'm not the sort of person who works for other people. So I work for myself. But, you know, the beauty of an entrepreneur who takes a product or service and finds that maybe they've improved it for themselves, they've improved it for other people, the beauty of it is whatever you can do in life to improve the quality of other people's lives, they will pay you usually in direct proportion to the value of that, at least within a certain amount of reason or competitive market prices, which is that reason in and of itself. And so the beauty of the human spirit and capitalism, entrepreneurism, you know, you

see the different, I grew up, you know, looking at communism, the USSR in the face and, you know, wondering why, you know, capitalism was better than communism and all the other different facets of government authority out there, socialism, et cetera, et cetera. And it always struck me from a very early age that that spirit of freedom, that spirit of entrepreneur to be able to create, to be able to excel, to be able to be rewarded for excelling and working hard. Because in communism or socialism, it doesn't matter how you work,

you know, everyone gets the same, right? So seeing that is just really amazing. And, of course, I've watched growing up in the 80s and coming of age in the 80s where the rise of Wall Street started putting Main Street out of business. You know, we've seen how that's kind of come out of the wash with the dissolving of the wash with the dissolving of the middle class. What were some other things you found in the book? It talks about how commonly held myths, contradictions about government policy. I imagine you wrote how well

the, you know, how the government, you know, giving everyone money or trying to give everyone money. I know people who didn't get money and went out of business. But how did that all play out? Right. So, you know, our policies towards small business make no sense. The original sin in 1953, you know, Dwight Eisenhower creates a small business administration. Great. You know, he's a Republican.

They wanted to kind of counter this idea that we're only for big business. He creates a small business administration. Great. You know, he's a Republican. They wanted to kind of counter this idea that we're only for big business. He creates a small business administration. But then they define, but they, the mistake was they define small businesses up to 500 employees. They did polls at the time. And like most small businesses, what two, five, 10, 20 10, 20, you know, 3% thought it was over 100 employees. They made it 500 employees. And you see the way that played out with the payroll protection program, the PPP. It was like it was the program created to help small businesses. And what happened? You know, all these larger businesses with, you know, hundreds of employees, you know, cut the line.

They have lawyers. They have, you know, They have the wherewithal. Like all these small businesses, you have two or five employees. You just got walloped. You could barely get yourself to work, but now you have to figure out this complex group of forms. And it was very complicated.

And this didn't get as much attention as I thought it should. We all heard that Shake Shack and Roost Chris, these large publicly traded corporations with thousands and thousands of employees somehow got PPP money. It's because right at the end, right before this $2.3 trillion CARES Act passed in the spring of 2020, the three words were inserted, were inserted per physical location. So you had all these chains, hotel chains and restaurant chains primarily that have 50 employees per locale, but thousands across the country. And so that's how they were able to get millions and millions of dollars. And then when you saw what happened is lots of what I would call legitimate small businesses got nothing. The government came and they replenished it. They didn't change those words. So Shake Shack gave the money back because

they were shamed by it. But hundreds of publicly traded corporations did not give the money back and they took advantage of that loophole. And so, you know, I look at PPP as ill-conceived. It was chaotic. It was overly complicated in a way that really hurt, you know, your typical small business person who might know how to cook a steak, a hairdresser who knows how to cut hair and treat customers, but how are they going to negotiate these complex forms and these rules? Like, you know, the rules went off at dozens and dozens of pages,

but, you know, it worked anyway. Again, like I cracked at the start of the show, you put a trillion or so dollars. I think PPP was about $800 billion and there's this second program for small businesses. It's been around for a long time, but it came in very handy during COVID, the Economic Injury Disaster Loan, EIDL, it's called. There's another, I don't know, 150, 200 million in that. So it's like a trillion

dollars. So you see, you could throw this money inefficiently, foolishly, but a trillion dollars goes a long way. and it saved a lot of businesses. Several of the businesses I talked to said, I would not have survived without polling shows and small businesses say, many small businesses say this was the difference between surviving and not surviving. But I really wish we could recategorize, you know, what's a small business? I mean, if you have 300 employees, to my mind, you're a medium business, not a small business. You know, according to our government, you're still a small business and you get every advantage of any small business, government loans at a

reduced rate, et cetera. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here with a little station break. Hope you're enjoying the show so far. We'll resume here in a second. I'd like to invite you to come to my coaching, speaking, and training courses website. You can also see our new podcast over there at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com. Over there, you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements, if you'd like to hire me, training courses that we offer, and coaching for leadership, management, entrepreneurism, podcasting, corporate stuff. With over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as a CEO, I think I can offer

a wonderful breadth of information and knowledge to you or anyone that you want to invite me to for your company. Thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you listening to the show and be sure to check out chrisfossleadershipinstitute.com appreciate you listening to the show. And be sure to check out ChrisVossLeadershipInstitute.com. Now back to the show. Yeah, it was insane. I remember the drop, and I had a lot of friends, especially in California, that were trying to get their businesses saved. They were small businesses. It was almost like all the big companies just whooped in, gobbled down all the money because they could gobble it in

big chunks and so like a lot it was like gone overnight and you were just like and people were just like uh whatever and you know like you mentioned if you don't have the savvy attorneys you don't have the savvy bankers you know um and on that note like so the the congress made i think a rational a rational decision, said the SBA, the Small Business Administration, cannot handle, you know, millions and millions of applicants all at once. So they said, we're going to have your local bank do it. We're going to have your bank. But, you know, there were a lot of banks that were in the initial round not included. So if you were unlucky enough that your bank wasn't one of the big ones that had already been approved, you're out of luck. And again, a bias in the program that I don't think the folks who wrote it meant to put in the program is all these banks.

Who are they going to help first you know the the hair salon owner you know who's asking for 20 000 that's like a you know a few hundred dollars worth of fee or some big corporation that gives them millions of dollars in business every year and of course they gave it this concierge service this special service to their best customers you know one of my best friends uh is a chase customer for his small business. Chase gave concierge service to its best customers and told customers like him, go online, good luck, fill out the form, we'll let you know if you got it. Wow. Yeah.

Wow. Meanwhile, by the time they get online, the bank account's empty for the rest of it. Well, it was. I think it was cleared in 13 days. $200 billion went to zero but again they replenished it tweaked the rules a little bit it wasn't until like this third round of ppp at the start of 2021 where they changed the rules for first off another big change they made is that straight knee another big mistake they made with PPP is to say, were you affected by the pandemic?

Of course I'm affected by the pandemic. I'm home. You know, my employees are home. Of course we're affected. It was only until the geniuses in Washington said like, well, maybe we should say you were economically harmed and you have to swear to that. And if they prove you didn't, then there'd be repercussions. And there was some fraud. You mentioned that earlier. But to me, a trillion dollars, like if there were a few billion dollars worth of fraud, well, that's still a tiny percentage. I mean, to me, it was a tiny percentage that it was the money had to get out there quickly.

There is corrupt people. There's people who took advantage. Some of them are getting their comeuppance. I'm sure many are not. But to me, you're helping 98% of the people and 2% was wasted. That's the price of the program. Yeah. And that's just government. That's just human beings. That's just human beings and government. So do you talk about in the book about how big Amazon grew? According to the New York Times, I'm pulling this. This is from April of 2021. Amazon profits sourced 22%. One of the big problems a lot of entrepreneurs are dealing with was losing employees to the big boxes.

Right. I talk about that a lot. So Hazleton, the city of 30 000 in pennsylvania brought up a couple of times they have one of the biggest amazon distribution centers um on the east coast in hazleton it's a major employer there employs a couple of thousand people and so amazon's prominent throughout the book on the front end for their bad behavior you know the chamber chamber of commerce the local chamber of commerce you know local government officials they're trying to like reach amazon and say like hey you know people working right near each other right next to each other going home like we really need to deal with this amazon was the only company in in the area that refused to even deal uh with them they basically

had to like have the local inspectors go in and demand to see. They just refused to participate. But, you know, they were offering kind of, you know, a year or so into the pandemic. They started passing out flyers. We'll give you a thousand dollar bonus. If you come work for us, they're paying 15, 16 an hour, you know, sometimes more. These small businesses, the cafe owner, you know, I mentioned before in Hazleton, they're not paying $15, $16 an hour. There are no benefits in that.

So that became hard to compete with. But the bigger point is we all love small business. You brought it up yourself. It's kind of central to who we are as Americans. We're independent, right? It's the blacksmith and the general store owner and the apothecary. That's kind of part of our origin tale. And yet what happens with each passing year, you know, Walmart's revenues go up. They went up by huge double digit amounts during the first couple of years of the pandemic. Amazon, big box stores, chains.

And so like, we like cheaper prices. We like convenience. And so on the one hand, we love small business. We want to support small business. On the other hand, we're sort of full of it. You know, we're sort of hypocrites because with each passing year and, you know, the pandemic just accelerated that.

I mean, just really, it's just kind of a vector change because you know we had to get our our goods and we're encouraged to stay home and so we all went online uh and bought it from amazon or some you know digital uh digital store so you know kind of for better for worse i don't know what alternative there was. You know, the Amazons of the world really just 2020 and 2021 were fantastic years for them. Yeah, and it created a real – I mean, there's a few different factors into it. Evidently, most of the boomers pre-early retired. Some people that were in my generation, Gen X, actually took early retirement and cashed out their 401ks. And I think they're finding they regretted that from some of the reporting I'm

seeing. And that created a bit of glut in the market. But I I recently saw a – I'm on there. I'm a single guy. What can you say? We have to get dates somehow. I recently saw something on TikTok that went viral, and it was a teacher who was giving up being a teacher to go be a manager at Amazon. And, you know, before the pandemic – I don't know if you cover this in the book, but before the pandemic, I remember all the arguments people were having about, we can't pay $10 an hour.

We can't, $15 an hour. We can't do that. Now, you know, I think there's a city somewhere in America that has enacted, a city or two, I think California's done something, but there's a city that's said minimum wage is now $20 an hour. We went from like, yeah, we're never going to pay over $10 and $8 an hour has to stay to now it's like just, you know, it's craziness. And, of course, that makes it hard, like you said, on Main Street people as well. Right, right. You know, I mean, we've been talking about Amazon. There's Walmart.

So, you know, I basically focus on three locales, Hazleton, Old Forge, which is this town of 8,000 right outside of Scranton, and Ticanic. It's a rural area. It's a town of 1,700. It's the county seat. It's the big town for a sparsely populated county. And, you know, they had a robust Main Street, Tioga Street is called. And then a Walmart opened right on the wrong side of the town line. So it drew all this business to the Walmart, which really hurt local retail.

You know, the clothing shop, the shoe shop, the hardware store, because they could get cheaper prices there. Had a double whammy. They were outside the town line. And so the town of Takanak got none of the tax money because they're no longer there. And, you know, it's just, I mean, one positive in doing this book is, you know, I go to Takanak and I see the roadkill, basically, of Walmart moving to town. But there was this big effort by folks in town, let's revive the movie theater. And that brought a couple of restaurants back. And some of the retail came back.

They looked for, okay, well, Walmart's selling cheaper goods, so why don't we go the step above and kind of nicer goods, because that's not competing with Walmart. And, you know, when COVID hit, they had all this progress. And I saw this in towns all over the place. They had all this progress. And that was the big fear when COVID hit, like all this progress would be lost. Like, you know, we've come back, we're, you know, really reviving things after taking the hit from Walmart, from the internet and all. And, you know, the good news here, it's, you know, I'm so used to as a journalist writing about, you know, intractable problems, you know, race and poverty and those kinds of things. But this is a really hopeful book.

Again, there is pain around, but, you know, there's something about that entrepreneurial spirit. There's something about the civic spirit where the towns came together, the cities came together, they helped one another. You know, I talked before about how we're all hypocrites because, you know, despite our love of small business, it seems that Amazon gets richer with each passing year. But on the other hand, you know, several of the retailers I spoke to said there was this real recognition during the pandemic of the importance of small business, right? It was getting a lot of attention, how much we were relying on Amazon and online places. There was all this reporting about what would be lost if all these small businesses went out. And so there was a concerted

effort to really support local business. Again, I, I heard it time after time, after time, they went into Christmas, like, oh my goodness, how are we going to do between, you know, the stimulus dollars, the extra unemployment dollars in people's pockets and this desire, like, I don't want to live in a town or a city where it's just big box stores and, you know, on the outskirts of town and these chains. And so I think that helped too, that people were very conscious. People were more aware of the threats to small business because of COVID.

Yeah, I mean, I saw a lot of that movement. I think there was online stuff. American Express has always done something every year lately for Main Street where they have a big buy local Main Street support. But, you know, a lot of my local businesses, you know, there was like, you know, let's save small business. You know, let's go out and shop there.

People would go shop and make it a point to go there because they realize, you know, you were going to lose the local pizza shop and you can't lose the local pizza shop because that's definitely Armageddon. Plus the charm, right? I mean, what's downtown? What's the main strip in a town if it's not interesting shops and interesting restaurants?

And so, you know, again, there was some positive that came out of, you know, a very unpleasant experience. Not that we're done with it. But, you know, there very unpleasant experience, not that we're done, done with it, but you know, there, there, there's some, there's some good things. Yeah. I mean, I remember, uh, one restaurant that I've always enjoyed, they actually had to put up a sign that said, and if you still go around my, my city right now, there's just signs everywhere to hire people. Um, and it's like, where you go, you, you walk in you're like okay well sign um there was one a restaurant that they offered a hundred dollar gift card to patrons if they referred something from them yeah i was like i was like maybe i should get my day job i could just i need to

figure out how to hustle people to come to work here and 100 bucks a pop you know if i can get a you know a bunch of people to get here i make some money um so and you made a point you know american express i i took advantage of this like you know shop at a local at a small business and we'll give you five bucks you know up to 50 you know so like i i was frequent frequently frequenting these places anyway you know as a reporter and every time i like okay, I get that five bucks and stuff. So a lot of the big companies, I mean, even Amazon, I mean, Amazon is the biggest killer of small businesses, but you know, they had to run their ads saying how great they are for small business.

Of course you could put your shop on, you know, the Amazon marketplace. And so in that sense, they're supportive, but you know, they, they came over the program like other big corporations did, know to help small business and stuff so then you know that there was chambers of commerce put up you know put together special programs that you know you know raffle off you know a hundred dollars eat at this restaurant if you contribute and kind of stuff give you rewards if you frequent you know small So it really was kind of a nice time where people came together and really did help save Main Street. Yeah.

And even Amazon, I don't think a lot of people talk about this or discuss it much, mainly because we don't like to have it talked about because we like our little corner. But I've been an Amazon seller, reseller, seller,, uh, I think since 2004, 2013, where we've sold stuff, we, we buy goods, resell them, you know, and there's people that make a lot of money doing this more than I do. Um, you know, we, it's just one of our revenue streams. We sold more stuff during that time because people were buying stuff because they were stuck at home. And so they were buying online and actually helped a lot of small businesses help me.

We sold more shit during those two years than anything. Like we, we kept running out of everything. Um, plus people had more money, right? I mean, yeah,

they had money to spend with, uh, yeah, that's spending on vacation. They're not spending. Yeah, that's true. They weren't spending on gas.

They go sit in a car for four hours to do things. You know, it even, you know, for the podcast, you know, our podcast at that time had been around for 10 years. We'd been interviewing CEOs and Silicon Valley types and technology and discussing, you know, at least $100,000, $150,000 worth of business go right up in smoke because one of my revenue streams was doing events. And so CES show, NAB show, South by Southwest, all the big events that basically have shut down for three years. I watched this money just go up and smoke guaranteed money um and so i had to sit down and go well fuck what how do we readjust and so i said you know what i i i'm really tired of talking about technology i want to talk about the world politics all the stuff that i'm interested in i want to bring brilliant people like yourself pulitzer prize winning people onto the show and so we realigned the show to bring on authors and more CEOs,

leaders, and entrepreneur people. And we did that at the beginning of 2020. The show's doubled and tripled in size every year. And just in August, we were up 30% on top of the new triple. So it'll be interesting to see where we're at next year. But, you know, we were one of those entrepreneurs who said, well, we've got to tweak the system and adjust and make it work. But yeah, I love how you written about, um, the real heart of what I believe America is in America. Capitalism. Like

you say, we, we, we kind of vault these, you know, Elon Musk's the world and Silicon Valley and stuff, but the real heart of the country is, is main street and hopefully it always will be. I don't know. Right. I mean, half, half the jobs in this country are, are small businesses. And again, I mean, to me, the personality of a place, I mean, you know, it's funny, there's this expression, you hear politicians on the right, the left, everywhere in the middle, the backbone of America. And, you know, I mean, the truth is, I hate to admit it, the backbone of America are the chains, right?

It's the one thing that kind of ties us together that there's a McDonald's here, there's a McDonald's there. So I don't think it's the backbone, but I think it's kind of the personality. It's what makes a place special. It's what makes you feel good. You go to the local pharmacy. If it's a Walgreens, a CVS, you're not going to know the name of your pharmacist. There's no... But I feature this pharmacist out in the rural area, and everyone knows Joe. and it's a different experience. I mean, he sponsors the Little League team. He's a civic leader.

You know, I don't mean to, you know, rip on CBS or something. I think they're the eighth largest corporation in America by revenue because they're not just CBS. CBS, they own an insurance company and sort of this pharmacy benefit manager, this middle broker that siphons off a lot of money and is part of the reason we pay so much for our pharmaceuticals. But, you know, it's like he's a central part of his community. And, you know, we miss that. If, you know, again, if the doomsday predictions had come true, if government didn't step up, if all of us didn't step up in our way, we would have lost more than just that business. You know, we would have lost kind of what holds us together as a community. In fact, it's funny. I wrote about New Orleans after Katrina.

And, you know, what people talked about when their neighborhoods were flooded, two things. One, they're neighbors, right? I want to have my neighbors. But the other thing, the grocery store, the dry cleaner, the restaurant. Like, that's what made it feel special to live in that community. So, like, you know, small business, it's more than just, you know, the place where you buy stuff, you know, it really is kind of the fabric of a community. There you go. Almost the identity, would you say? I think so. I think so. I mean, you know, there might be some places where it's more generic, but places that are special, you know, I mean, when I, I'm in New York city, a huge city, but you know,

we have become so expensive to small businesses that all these great little shops, there used to be a great pizza place near me where, you know, you see guys in suits eating their pizza next to workmen in their boots and their, you know, work shirts and, you know, moms with their kids there and everyone was together. It was such a nice scene. It closed. It couldn't afford the rent anymore. So again, it's like this thing that holds us together. It really is the personality.

It's the feel of a place. And a lot of small businesses have that. It's the personality, the owner, the people you know. We see that with the people who review the show and stuff. They love coming back because they know me. If you replace me with somebody else, I don't know where we go. Maybe they'd be better. That might not work.

But, no, you know, it's the people you know, their name. It's that personalization where you can walk into a shop and then that guy who knows you it's kind of like that uh i have the song of uh cheers running through my head where everybody knows your name you know you know the guy behind the counter he knows you he knows what you like you know what he likes and there's kind of a personality uh personalization there some of my friends from tech about from tech, uh, technology in Silicon Valley wrote about how, uh, social media and force four square back when it was a thing, um, you know, would, would reach this point to where when you arrived at your hotel room, you know, there'd be a bottle of your favorite scotch there, you know, whatever they, they know what your favorites are

and, and customer service present that to them. That's never got achieved. And but, you know, there's something about knowing the guy, you know, the guy who makes your food or the gal who makes your food. You know, I think we've all experienced that. Like you go in a restaurant and the person says hello to you and, you know, TJ behind the stove and he comes out and says hello to you you know i i i lived in chicago in a neighborhood like it was larry the butcher you know tony the fruit and vegetable guy and no i mean it and it felt good and you know the opposite does not feel good to just sort of be you know anonymous i mean you know it's funny in the book i sort of rank

me my family you know supporting small business versus relying on Amazon, etc. We go to the local pharmacy. There's a CVS that's closer to my house. We go to the local pharmacy. I like saying hello to Claude. Claude knows us. I don't know. It doesn't make a difference. I'm getting the same pharmaceutical from Claude as I would from CVS, but it does make a difference. I don't think I'm that rare in being like that. You know what, you're giving me some insight to something. I've had a rant going in my head for a while that I've wanted to talk about. And I really hate the

Walmart forcing, and I think other companies do it too, but they force you to check out your groceries now. My local Walmart is a smaller one, and it literally will force everyone to go through a small checkout. They won't put a cashier on duty unless someone asks, which usually I'm the hell raiser of the group, so I'm usually like, hey, can I get somebody to do this checkout? I'm not doing this myself. I don't get paid to do your work.

But I've always thought that I'm just being an asshole, which everyone knows I am. But really, what you said kind of dawned on me that I like that personal experience. I like having that human connection. It may be brief. It may be short. But I like that. I know. I talk to them. When I go to the grocery store. It may be brief. It may be short. But I like that. I know. I talk to the – when I go to the grocery store, I always say hello.

I mean, there's a few I go to more regularly. So, you know, I'll chat kind of. And it makes my life just a little bit – Rachel, I'm scared that that's the future. When I think about the future, like the number one job category in this country right now is driver. And we're going to driverless cars. Is it really? Cash register. People working cash registers, whether it goes to a store or anywhere, that's being phased out.

What is our future? What are people going to do? I'm thinking about tens of millions of drivers, cash registrar operators, all these jobs that might be phased out. And, you know, there's the economic impact and what you and I are talking about right now, which might not be as significant, but I still think is a factor here is the human factor, the human touch. Yeah, the human touch factor. Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to really, you know, I sit alone right in a room all day. I'd like to kind of have a little bit of interaction, you know, with the human being and not, you know, your

scanner. Yeah. I, I, uh, the, the rant, uh, that actually kind of peaked for me the other day that that's cooking in my head. I was, I, I was going to Walmart the other day and they put someone on the till to help me do the checkout. Um, that was new. It wasn't very good. And I was sitting there thinking in my head, I could be doing self checkout better than this guy. And it dawned on me kind of like that.

Jeff Foxworthy bit that he does where he realized after 20 years, his wife had trained him to get up and turn out, turn up the heat when she just makes a comment. It dawned on me that Walmart has trained me to be their employee, and I don't get paid for any of it. In fact, they pay much higher prices for goods to their profit. And it really made me pissed off because I'm like, damn it really and you know but what you're talking about really brings into what i'm cooking on because i realized that my anger at that depth of my core of my rant is that loss of human interaction experience and uh so what if the guy fumbles the order so what that's part

of the human experience as part of you know he's gonna screw up i screw up with my clients sometimes and they go hey don't worry about it man you know um and part but still we're interacting as human beings and i think that's you know one of the most important things and i think it's good that your book recognizes that vaults it and says hey man without these without this great sort of american um community and and what we do and stuff, we kind of lose the face of what America is maybe. I don't know. Well, and, you know, there is,

I appreciate what you're saying about, you know, fumble of the order, but there is kind of a higher quality to much of what's made by a small business, like a restaurant. You know, I'd rather have TJ Cusimano's, you know, a risotto or chicken masala than, you know, I'd rather have T.J. Cusimano's, you know, risotto or chicken masala than, you know, Olive Garden. Not to rip out Olive Garden. I haven't been in a decade.

So I'm being totally unfair. I have no idea the quality of food. I think it was 30 years ago I ate at one. But with that said and that big caveat, you know, restaurants, you're getting a higher quality. You know, you can go to your Supercuts or you could go to Billman's Hair Salon, the hair salon in my book, and she's going to do a better job. She knows her customers. They come back time after time. They know that, you know, she knows what they like.

And so sometimes there is a much higher quality. Sometimes you're paying more. There's a book out there. I can't remember the name, but just as well because i don't particularly like it um but they make the argument that why should government be helping small businesses at all unless it's the small business that aims on becoming a big business because it's big business that hires people it's big businesses that are efficient and makes our economy work more efficiently big businesses by the, are much more likely to give you benefits than a small business.

So, you know, I mean, there is an argument there, but I don't know. It's just painful reading that because, like, I don't want to live in your world. Yes, it might be more efficient. I don't doubt that. And, you know, I wish we all got benefits, but I think the solution there is to have businesses giving benefits, but have it through government. But that's a different topic for another time. Definitely. Definitely. And, and it's, it's, I think it's important that you vault this. I think it's important that you shine a light on it and say how important this is. And yeah, like you say, the, the love and care that

goes into a business. I had a business around the corner from me for a while in Vegas that made the best burger I've ever had in my life. Best bun, best burger. This guy was I don't know what alien planet he came from, but he put the most love and care into every burger and I would go buy there. And I knew he was struggling

after a while because he was kind of the problem was his pricing wasn't like McDonald's where you can go get a dollar off the menu thing. But it was the best damn burger I ever had in my life. And if you've seen me lately, I've eaten a few burgers, so I would know. Man, I was about ready to go start knocking on doors in the neighborhood to keep him in business when he told me he was going out of of business and he was struggling and uh you know there were some mistakes that he made that that he should have done for his business i haven't thought about buying it out um but uh you couldn't replace

him was one of the problems you know normally when i we used to buy out companies and do loans that's how we took over a lot of companies um you know, we'd have to take the entrepreneur out because the entrepreneur just wasn't good at what he was doing. But, you know, people, it really comes down to me, what I've always aligned with entrepreneurism is the American spirit. And it's the thing that built, you know, New York when all the immigrants came here from other countries and they went to work and they built things and they sold things and they sweat blood, sweat, tears and built this country. You know, my great-grandfather came here as an immigrant from Germany in the 1800s. And we stepped off the boat and off the train. He didn't speak a

lingo English and people took him in and he worked hard and he built small businesses. And yeah, we need to really reward and vault and shine uh, reward and vault and, and, uh, shine a light to main street and say, Hey, let's work harder to spend more money at these folks and keep these people in business for the love and care that they deliver. You know, I was burnt out on my podcast in 2020, 2019, 2020. I was tired of talking to CEOs and technology. It's like, yada, yada, what can you do now? I've never owned anything in all my life because I've always been an investor and I've never been an entrepreneur, created something they loved and then did it for other people.

Never done that in my lifetime. I love my podcast more than I love anything I've ever created in all my life, which says a lot. And I love it now for everything we, all the changes we made during COVID. And it's the one thing I enjoy doing. I do it for free any day of the week, which is crazy because that's the sort of love you have for it. So I'm glad that you're shining a light on all these great people who do this beautiful thing for entrepreneurism and we should, we should,

we should celebrate it more. I agree. You know, it's interesting. You're talking about people who are passionate or just really good. TJ Cusimano has been cooking since he's in the third grade. He loves it. Every friend he had growing up, like, yeah, of course, he was going to be a restaurant owner. But, you know, there's something else. In fact, you're kind of describing yourself this way as, okay, it's a passion that's causing me to take over this business.

It's a good idea. I'm not the type who should be working for a big corporation. I wouldn't be happy. They wouldn't be happy with me. I don't play well in that kind of circumstance. And so, you know, there's a lot of small businesses out there that it's just a way of having a decent living. It's a way of having independence. It comes with a lot of stress. But as you said, at the top of the show, like you put in the work, you get the reward.

In fact, the rural pharmacist I mentioned before, he worked as a pharmacist for a thrift drug. So, you know, it was a big chain that's been gobbled up by other big chains. And now as part of CVS or Walgreens, I can't remember and stuff.

And after a year or two, it's like, I know I'm going to work harder as a pharmacist, but I know that I'm going to pay myself. I'm going to get through my hard work rather than thrift drugs or whatever large corporation. And, you know, there's stresses with that. You know, you can't make payroll. What are you going to do?

Do you borrow from yourself? Like you bankruptcy? I mean, you know, there's big repercussions. There's a lot of stress that you wouldn't have if you're just working for a corporation, but he knew himself. I am not going to be happy working for some, you know, big outfit and being a cog in the wheel. And I'd rather, if I'm going to work hard, I'd rather work hard for me rather than for them. Definitely. And there's something about it. I mean, I pulled companies back from the brink of bankruptcy that entrepreneurs are driven in the ground. I've seen what that's like. I've lived, you know, having to lose everything and then start again and, you know, the 2008 recession and stuff.

And to me, it's just the American spirit and it's a beautiful thing. So thank you very much for writing the book and shining a light on this. So thank you very much for writing the book and shining a light on this and hopefully more people will take a note and celebrate their Main Street. Well, thank you so much for having me on. Thanks, Chris. Thank you.

Give us your plugs, Gary, one more time so people can find you on the interwebs. It's GaryRivlin.com is my website. You can see all my books there and Saving Main Street, this book. And I'd love for you to buy and read it. It's anRivlin.com is my website. You can see all my books there and Saving Main Street, this book. And I'd love for you to buy and read it. It's an easy read. I really want to make sure that this wasn't a dense book.

It's just the story of these people. They are facing a challenge, and this is how they dealt with it. And to me, the American spirit. So check out the book, guys. Order it up wherever fine books are sold. Saving Main Street, Small Business in the Time of COVID-19. You can find it wherever fine books are sold.

Order it off of the big Amazon if you will. But it helps small business people like Gary. I don't want to throw you in the small business segment so forgive me if I No, no. Technically, according to the U.S. government, I am a small business.

I am not a small business. I'm just a guy. But anyone self-employed is considered a small business. So I'm a small business. You're a small business. But I was writing more about retailers and restaurants and small manufacturers. There you go. There you go.

And to me, it's the great American story. It's the beauty of Americanism, and it's what makes us different than socialism, fascism, communism. China, it's the great equalizer that built one of the greatest countries in the world, if you can call us that. If we're still that, I don't know. We'll see. That turns out.

But hopefully it's the gift that keeps on giving and keeps rewarding the spirit. Thanks, Monis, for tuning in. Be sure to support your local small business, man. Go in and say hello to Anthony or John or Meg or Betty or whoever and say hello and make sure you tip well. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss, youtube.com, 4chesschrisfoss. Support our small business. I know you tip well. Go to goodreads.com, Fortune.com, YouTube.com,

Fortune.com, Support our small business. I know you guys do. All of our groups on LinkedIn as well. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys

next time. Thanks, Gary.