In Long Beach, there is something beyond the surface of Small Business Saturday, American Express’ national campaign to make the day after Black Friday a separate, locally focused shopping holiday. Behind the banal redundancy of too many editorials that preach of the small business as the “engine of our economy.” Beyond the cheap anti-corporate milieu of those who are simultaneously closeted Wal-Mart shoppers and find it much easier to talk than walk. Behind the seeming contradiction of the world’s most elite credit card company telling you to use (their) money at non-elite locales.
Beyond all that, there is something far more intriguing in this city about the middle-day of the Black Friday-Small Business Saturday-Cyber Monday triad that marks the biggest consumer holidays of the year. For a day that is devoted entirely to shopping not at big-name retailers, but instead local small businesses, in the words of Moss&Rock owner Cat Madrid-Barone, Long Beach is the perfect amount of cool.
And I don’t mean the five-times distilled ironic cool, where a dude covered with all too of-the-period tats and a porn stache sports American Apparel clothes, perhaps throwing in a bright Justin Beiber tank while simultaneously sporting an Annihilator hat (and not knowing that Annihilator was indeed, like The Beibs, involved in music). That’s L.A. “cool.” Always in heavy quotes, never a direct reference to anything, slathered in some odd mix of Beverly Center and Melrose.
Long Beach cool is the 60-year-old-going-on-30 woman, listening to a Billie Holiday vinyl she scored at Fingerprints on her restored midcentury Magnavox stereo console from MAKE Collectives, all the while sipping on zin she got at District Wine as she discusses the importance the Assistance League in Long Beach and cotemplates dinner at Asha.
Long Beach cool is the 200lb queer who acts like a 100lb twink, strutting out of The Crypt onto Broadway with a Nasty Pig jock in one hand and his phone locked onto Grindr in the other, all before he cures his thirst at the city’s longest happy hour at The Falcon and having the Pizza Place next door walk over and bring him his breadsticks and pizza (he’s growin’ and a gurl’s gotta eat).
Long Beach cool is the chick who bought a better-than-Forever-21 printed dress from Francesca’s Collections, vintage cowgirl boots from La Bomba, a straw hat from the Feed Store, and goes to The Stache Bar to actually drink bourbon and play some Ryan Adams by holding her phone on speaker up in the air.
Long Beach cool is the obsessive bicyclist who stops by The Bicycle Stand to not only replace a tire but check out the new gear before biking to City Grounds to do the same, chatting with the boys who hand-built the interior of their men’s clothing and shoe stores Forever Ashbury to see if they’ll give him a discount on their nothing-short-of-awesome LB Secret Weapon hat (in the ethos of our most dedicated Long Beachers is a knowledge that there’s a bargain to be bartered on every sale transaction at a small business).
Long Beach cool is the fact that we don’t need to be cool and, in a world dominated by the inundation of corporatized images of what one should be (does anything really taste better than feeling skinny?), we don’t need malls to survive. There are enough small businesses in this city to make every day Small Business Saturday, a fact obvious to anyone who rolls through our business districts and is stoked to see a lack of brand name franchises (there’s a reason you have to go to Signal Hill to shop at Costco).
And while you will find me this Saturday traipsing around town (not talking in the winded way in which I write, I assure you) whipping out my anorexic wallet to offer what I can, curing my Thanksgiving hangover with breakfast at the Coffee Cup, drinking the damned best iced coffee in town to wake up from a food coma thanks to Shortnin Bread, followed by an excessive intake of alcoholic beverages per The Factory’s beer selection and a stumble down Broadway for some strong spirits served up by Miguel at the divey comfort of the am-I-listening-to-karaoke-or-a-giraffe-dying Broadway Bar, all to curb the caffeinated fuel I so earlier craved and inducing what will probably be a second hangover… While I partake in all this holiday brouhaha, you don’t need me to tell you how perfect Long Beach is for Small Business Saturday and how one should incorporate it into their quotidian existence.
Let the Big Boss himself tell ya, considering American Express filmed its Shop Small commercial (currently being aired on primetime TV nationwide) right here in Long Beach’s East Village, it’s clear this city is on the right track: