The competition between mom-and-pop businesses and big retail chains has been running for decades now, but there is an interesting aspect to this which isn’t discussed as often. The competition is still going, despite every expert putting small businesses down for the count during the early days.

Are Mom-and-Pop Businesses Making a Comeback?

It’s true that numerous family-owned small businesses did close down at an alarming rate when the retail chains first started monopolizing their respective sectors. They suffered an even bigger blow during the pandemic. However, things have changed a lot in recent times as several new mom-and-pop stores have opened up in the last three years or so.

Plenty of older family businesses that went out of business earlier were also able to come back in recent years. In fact, it’s an official fact that there are now more family owned businesses in the United States in 2023, than there was at any point in the last decade. So, what are the factors that are allowing mom-and-pop places to survive even in face of such powerful competition?

Advent of the eCommerce Platform

Amazon might be the biggest online retail chain in the world, but they also have more small businesses selling through their platform than anything else out there. Of course, smaller businesses with enough resources can also skip the big brand partnerships altogether now and start selling via their own eCommerce platform instead. Either way, the amount of money that family owned businesses now save by conducting most of their business online is a huge reason why they’re able to survive and even thrive now.

The Option to Choose between Vendors

Nowadays, there are online comparison platforms that smaller businesses can use to choose their vendors and suppliers to find better rates and products. For example, Texas has deregulated energy supply for all commercial establishments, which means that choosing their own electricity plans for businesses in Corpus Christi is now an easy and quick process.

Similarly, there are now platforms to compare rates between almost every type of vendor, ranging from construction supplies to agricultural produce. Therefore, better deals from wholesalers are no longer limited to larger enterprises.

Access to Selective Digital Marketing

The potential which online marketing holds for family owned businesses today is nothing short of tremendous. Selective internet marketing has allowed small businesses to reach more target customers and grow their respective trades at extremely high cost-to-conversion rates.

This accessibility to affordable marketing is a huge part of what changed the game for family owned SMEs. Competing with the bigger brands within a certain demographics is now a very real and achievable possibility for local small businesses. They do not need to have a million dollar marketing budget to do so either, provided that the business has a reliable, budget-optimized digital marketing plan in place.

As we can see from the reasons cited here, it’s the internet that actually proved to be the biggest boon for mom-and-pop stores. From eCommerce to digital marketing, the world wide web essentially played the single most important role in the family-owned business sector’s resurgence in the US.