America’s small businesses can’t catch a break.
After two years of shutdowns and restrictions due to the Covid-19 pandemic, they’re straining to keep up with price increases without losing customers to larger competitors. They are struggling to keep positions filled as competition for workers remains at a fever pitch. And just at the moment that many business owners begin to recover and shore up their depleted savings, they’re worried that the Federal Reserve’s medicine for inflation will bring fresh hardship: higher borrowing costs and timid consumers.
Surveys show that small-business sentiment has taken a markedly pessimistic turn in recent months — even more so than that of professional forecasters and of corporate executives.
In June, the National Federation of Independent Business measured its lowest reading ever for economic expectations. The nonprofit Small Business Majority, in a survey in mid-July, found that nearly one in three small businesses couldn’t survive for more than three months without additional capital or a change in business conditions. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Small Business Index for the second quarter showed that inflation had skyrocketed to the top of owners’ concerns. Seventy-five percent of participants in Goldman Sachs’s small-business coaching program reported that higher costs had impaired their finances.
New from me: Small businesses got help to weather the pandemic, but keep taking hit after hit — from high prices to rising interest rates — and no more help is on the horizon. https://t.co/i8jxDb4H49
— Lydia DePillis (@lydiadepillis) July 26, 2022