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Guest column/Our area and our chamber work well together

If a locomotive in full throttle was hurtling down upon us, would we leap with alacrity to avoid our demise? You bet.

The “locomotive” here is a metaphor used to represent a ruthless economic adversary we’ll call “Jeff” (to whom you’ll be introduced shortly). Jeff’s adversary is the Jefferson County Chamber of Commerce.

“Jeff’s” DNA is alien and antibiosic. The chamber’s DNA is local and symbiotic. “Antibiosis” is an antagonistic relationship in which each party detrimentally affects the other. “Symbiosis” is a mutually rewarding relationship in which each party enriches the other. We need to disengage from “Jeff” and support business members of the chamber of commerce, reject antibiosis and select symbiosis.

“Jeff” has been economically bearing down on our community in a full throttle capable of producing financially devastating ramifications, which we have yet to fully appreciate. Oblivious of “Jeff’s” economic tyranny, we keep unknowingly contributing to “Jeff’s” inebriating personal fortune — lavishing in $109 billion — while some retailers struggle in comparative penury.

“Jeff” is Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, the online-shopping behemoth that became a trillion-dollar company last September. Jeff’s $109 billion fortune catapulted him to become the richest man in the world in 2018, displacing Microsoft’s Bill Gates. Jeff added $34.2 billion to his net worth in 2017, alone, while many small businesses grappled to hang on and keep afloat. Do we need to give Jeff more of our money?

Online shopping — known as e-commerce, an invading alien pillager — not only enabled Jeff Bezos to become a multi-billionaire, it insidiously eroded local merchants, businesses and economy, precipitating loss of employment, loss of financial independence, loss of self-reliance, fragmentation of family cohesiveness and deterioration of lifestyle, an insalubrious combination.

We can pre-empt Bezos’ locomotive of economic desolation by supporting our chamber and patronizing its business members, rather than purchasing from alien, online businesses. We symbiotically support our chamber and our chamber symbiotically provides vitalizing business members that enable us and our community to prosper and enjoy a salubrious and effervescent lifestyle.

We turn from “Jeff Bezos” to Tricia Maple-Damewood, chamber president, and her staff, who are much more attractive than Bezos.

Note that I referred to “our” chamber of commerce, for we are all an integral part and inextricable partner of the chamber.

We are locked into an indissoluble, mutually dependent, symbiotic relationship with our chamber. We can either swim together harmoniously by supporting our chamber or discordantly sink alone. The fate of each affects the fate of the other.

A chamber of commerce and small business members are indispensable for a thriving community and affluent residents. The chamber is analogous to the heartbeat and lifeblood of a community; public support of the chamber businesses is the nourishment that sustains the community’s vascular system. Small businesses that comprise a chamber of commerce are what make a community vibrant, vital and vivacious by providing products, services, employment opportunities that would otherwise be lacking.

When we speak of small business, however, we unknowingly perpetuate a major misnomer. Small business is not small. It’s big; very big. Small businesses are the engines of job creation in the United States. There are 28 million small businesses in the U.S., which make up 99.7 percent of all U.S. firms. Small business in our country, therefore, is actually big business. Small businesses in our community, therefore, are important entities.

Small businesses account for 60 percent to 80 percent of all jobs in America, according to Forbes and Entrepreneur magazines. The Small Business Administration states that small business is the most important wheel that turns the economy in our country.

E-commerce is the nemesis of small business, stealthily drawing purchasing power away from local businesses, contributing to business closures. Since 2002, department store closings cost 448,000 jobs, a 25 percent decline in employment. E-commerce only added 178,000 jobs, leaving 270,000 former employees without jobs; 270,000 families with diminished incomes; 270,000 struggling financially to provide necessities. The loss of employment continues to increase ineluctably, seemingly irreversibly — unless we arrest the gushing e-commerce trend by patronizing our small businesses instead.

This is not an anachronistic isolationist view; it’s a factual reality. Historically the first stage of community decay, deterioration and desolation is failed small businesses, due to failed patronage. When we fail to nourish our community’s vascular system the heart of the city stops beating, its lifeblood stops flowing. The city shuts down, its business district atrophies, local commerce desiccates and the community becomes moribund.

The avalanche of business failures spawn socioeconomic adversity: Lost jobs and lost income diminish self-reliance, produce family stress and necessitate fragmentation. Members are forced to evacuate the community to seek gainful employment elsewhere. Online, the “Jeff Bozeses” bloat with wealth; in the community businesses atrophy on the vine.

Downtown businesses were once central gathering places for socialization and shopping, affording safe, vibrant and bustling environs that provided a cascade of amenities — a variety of stores to shop, restaurants to dine, theaters to attend, banks to conduct business and recreational opportunities to enjoy. Then two devastating economic locomotives barreled through communities.

First were nonresident malls that eroded downtown businesses, leaving behind a disconcerting, disillusioning, depressing socioeconomic quagmire: Defunct businesses, vacant storefronts, accumulating detritus, unhygienic debris, dismal atmospherics, unsavory loiterers and unsafe streets.

Second is the devastating locomotive unleashed by the behemoth of e-commerce, which annihilated malls and local businesses, leaving behind a wasteland of pockmarked vacancies, desiccated business districts and financial moribundity.

Forbes magazine reported that online purchasing was atrophying malls, running this ominous headline, “Shopping malls are being killed by online shopping.” Green Street Advisers, which tracks malls, the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and the New York Times, all concur in Forbes’ foreboding. In 1980, 94 percent of the 1,200 malls in the country were healthily flourishing. By 2017, some 8,600 local stores in malls had closed. Analysts predict one in every four remaining malls will close due to purchasing online rather than locally.

Aside from a few highly esoteric items, we have the best of everything in products and services in our own community. There’s no need to peck away online. Furthermore, when we buy locally we can “see, touch and determine” what we’re purchasing before we pay. When we buy online we pay for a photograph before we can see, touch and know what we’ve bought. And if it’s not what we’ve expected, try to get your money returned in less than two months.

Our chamber’s small businessmen and businesswomen are people of integrity, probity, acumen and responsibility. They are known to you, they are part of our culture, they speak in our native tongue and they are invested in our community.

Browse the website of our Jefferson County Chamber of Commerce, serving our community for 110 years. You will be impressed by the resources and be proud of the talent in our own community. If you have an aspiration you’d like to fulfill, an enterprise you’d like to launch, join the chamber. You’ll find immense support from chamber members and model small businessmen and women who are friendly, knowledgeable and eager to help.

Our chamber staff is also without peer. You’ll also find them more charming, gracious and attractive than Jeff Bezos.

(Potts is a resident of Steubenville.)

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