Card declined on $6.99
And the week that happened next....
(This is a photo of me and a ruru, Cricket, at Wingspan Bird of Prey Center. Another excellent NZ small business. I have literally no professional photos of me that aren’t me covered in burlesque glitter, so here’s a nice happy one that your Mum will love.)
Kia ora team,
Every so often in the life on a columnist, you write something that just absolutely blows up. And it’s never the stuff you think it’ll be.
It’s never the ones you’re super proud of, or put a lot of time and love into, or even the ones you expect will be a bit spicy.
It’s always the ones you write in a burst of feeling. This time, it was anger.
Last week, I wrote about getting declined for $6.99, on the day that Nicola Willis told us off for being downbeat about the economy.
And I wrote it because I was reallllyyyyy pissed at being told off.
I wasn’t pissed form a personal POV, I was pissed from a small business point of view.
This wasn’t a column on me being shit at managing my money. It was a column on just how hard it is for small business owners right now.
I haven’t talked about being a small biz owner in the column much. Mostly because it’s been absolutely eviscerating. But for the last 5 years I’ve had Club Burlesque. And we operated as basically a weekly burlesque show, and we did 8 seasons. That’s something like 100+ shows. Show wise, product wise, we were great. Everyone loved it, the Washington Post reviewed it, and it was a damn good show.
We did everything right. But about 6 months ago the bottom just dropped out of the market in Auckland. Consumer spending just, well, stopped. (I now know that consumer spending is down 60% across Oz and NZ in hospo and retail. But I didn’t know that at the time, I just knew something was happening.)
Every other hospo and entertainment venue we knew, had their sales shrivel up too. People went from doing 25k a week to doing 5k. And the sector has been feeling this for at least a year.
But by June this year we just couldn’t hang on. The weekly show had to close. (We’re still operating as a touring & arts festival show. But our weekly club show couldn’t sustain itself.)
I lost 50k, had to fire myself, and now am looking for a real job. And I’m one of the lucky ones.
I may have lost my life savings, but I didn’t have my house and my kid’s home tied up as security for my business loan. (Like a lot of hospo operators.) They’re the ones doing it really tough.
Anyway, a while ago, I started getting interested in why this was. About how things had got so bad across the sector. What the Government had done - and clearly NOT done - to support small business and contribute to this situation.
This is actually a good summary of the research here. In short, it’s worse than it was in the GFC except this time, the Gov aren’t helping small biz.
So when we were told to ‘cheer up’ and stop ‘being merchants of misery’ by Nicola Willis, freshly aware of all the things they’d NOT been doing…
Well. I was hella pissed. And I wrote about it here.
About how galling it is to told not be a negative nelly, by the ‘wealthy and sorted’ Government who’ve systematically failed to support small business in a recession and created conditions that are worse than the GFC.
So yeah. I was pissed. Wrote a column.
And then, well. It just blew up.
I’ve never had a response like last week. I must have had about 200 emails (of which I’m still only about half way through replying to) from similar small business owners who’ve had exactly the same thing happen to them too.
It was heartbreaking. All that pain. And all that determination in the face of it. My God, It just about broke my heart.
It’s what prompted me to write this week’s column, on how National has lost the small business vote. (Which is very ominous because small biz is this government’s voter backbone.)
Behind the scenes for me, it’s been weird. Not only being jobless, listening to everyone else going through the same thing. But you always want your stories to go off as a writer. You want to do that magical thing where you reach into the subconscious brain of the nation, rummage around, and pull out the thing that everyone’s half-articulated but never actually quite said out loud yet.
And I did that - I just wish it was about a happier story. Not how basically all small business owners (who are about 26% of NZ’s GDP btw) feel resoundingly shat upon. Reading all the emails was affirming on one level, I’d managed to give voice to something, and also deeply, utterly depressing.
Small businesses are full of the most hard working, industrious, gritty, hilarious people who genuinely care about their staff and their communities.
They’re not some big, faceless corporate. We fall in love in their wine bars and cry our hearts out in their bathrooms. They fill us with ambition the morning and with dreams at night. They are our life blood. They’re also doing everything right. None of this current hardship is their fault. And watching every business I love bleed out on the pavement from a fight they didn’t start…it’s heartbreaking.
Anyway, it’s been a big old fortnight.
One thing I’d say through all of this insanity is that the response from you fine folk has been the saving grace. I always write hoping my stories reach some part of you. And being able to voice something so many of us have been feeling - for so long - has been an absolute honour. (I’m not great at being serious about stuff, but I mean that from the bottom of my heart.)
Anywho. Have a read and let me know. And I hope you keep reading and enjoying. (I will get back to the emails soon!)
And from the very deepest bottom of my heart, thank you for reading.
See you next week.
V xo
Queen.