The National Retail Federation is not expecting this year’s holiday shopping season to be the sort of thing that will make the hearts of retailers glad. At least not much. Overall receipts are expected to decline by 1%; all the price slashing that will be needed to lure wary and broke customers into stores will [...]

The air is riddled with cliches during economic downturns, largely because the purveyors of said cliches are longing to say something encouraging and they don’t have the data to do it. One of those oft-heard cliches concerns the number of successful (and very large) companies we have today that were started during recessions. Microsoft, Apple [...]

If you were able to cull all the standard advice in order to design the perfect online microbusiness retail outfit, it would look something like this: First, find a market niche. Then offer your niche a set of products that are difficult to find, at prices that most will be able to afford (even if [...]

I bet you thought that was the name of a microbusiness in the title of this article. Perhaps you were even intrigued enough to wonder what sorts of products or services might be offered by such a cleverly named business. Sorry, but this is not going to be that sort of story. Cynthia Lockrow, MSSW, [...]

The sign says “Beware of CHICKEN” and, yes, that really is a chicken. Welcome to upstate New York, home of nonemployer microbusiness Silver Top Graphics and its owners Dan Flanagan and Lisa Tait.

If there is a single industry sector in which one expects to find microbusinesses — other than professional and technical services, that is — it is probably the information technology sector. Part of the reason for that is has to do with the sorts of Heroes of Capitalism myths and stories with which we Americans [...]

It is very clear from a brief review of the research literature available on small businesses that relatively little is known about nonemployer firms — which is to say, we know but we lack the research to prove it. So, for example, even as there is currently a multi-year, multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional research project to establish [...]

I’ve been saying for quite some time now that the U.S. economy is changing and one of the most fruitful ways available to me to gather corroborating evidence of that is to talk to microbusiness owners. That is because it often happens that, while the market giants whine and cry and lobby their Congresspersons to [...]

One of the neat things about talking to microbusiness owners is the way you can sometimes see the future happening, right now, through their eyes — fairly often simply because of the ways in which they structure their businesses. My conversation with Gayle Buske was a lot like that. Gayle and her husband, Jim, are [...]

The film industry is an interesting one because, much like the music industry, it has a reputation for being full of huge, well-heeled companies. In fact, says Josh Caldwell, there are a lot more small businesses in the film industry than you’d think. “Production companies and even distribution companies are not as big as the [...]