Black Friday v Small Business Saturday

I've just watched a video of shoppers in Bradford pushing and shoving each other to the floor in the race to cram the biggest/newest/cheapest tv/playstation/gizmo into a supermarket trolley and elbow their way to a checkout where it will no doubt add to their mounting debt and New Year misery. And all in the name of Black Friday. 

Who thought that one up. It wasn't an independent trader that's for sure.

Small businesses like ours don't have 50% or 30% of even 20% to cut off our prices in a mad pre-Christmas promotion. When we price a walk guide book that figure has been carefully worked out to cover the cost of printing (we could get a cheaper deal by printing in China but we don't want to when there's a perfectly good printer less than 20 miles away in the Yorkshire Dales), of transport and distribution and research and licences to OS for the use of up to date maps and software and office costs and wages  ....well I could go on but you get the picture. 

It's the giants - the supermarkets, the online retailers, the Tescos and Amazons of this world, who play fast and loose with their pricing and ruin small businesses along the way. We, the supplier, don't get a say in the price the big boys charge or the discounts they offer. So when a walker searches online for Dales Way by Colin Speakman for instance they'll find it for sale on our website for £11.99 and on Amazon at £7.79 - a whopping 34% discount. 

We're grateful to every single customer who buys one of our books wherever you buy them from. Without you we wouldn't have this business that we love. We're not sitting in judgement about where you shop or how much you pay. But there is one thing you can do. Support Small Business Saturday on December 6th. 

Buy your books from the bookshop, your cheese from the deli, your bread from the baker and your gifts from the Makers Fair. It'll help keep us all going for another year and I promise you won't get crushed in the rush.