Small businesses employ about half of the workers in this country and generate nearly half of the nation’s gross domestic product. These owners — and their employees — are a massive voting bloc. So with the election only a couple of weeks away, what’s their state of mind?
A number of surveys have been released in the past few weeks that cover tens of thousands of business owners, of every color and gender from across the country, representing the smallest to mid-sized organizations (that is, a few hundred persons). Here is a sample of what they had to say.
First, real monthly income decreased in September in eight of the 12 industry sectors tracked by the Intuit QuickBooks Small Business Index. Likewise, small-business revenue last month dipped in five of the eight regions monitored as part of the index, with zero or near zero growth in the remaining three.
However, a Small Business Index from payments and financial technology firm Fiserv, which tracked retail and restaurant point-of-sale transactions, revealed three straight months of “steady consumer spending” and — although retail trade declined in September — small-business sales increasing about 1.8 percent over the last year. So not a lot. But positive.
A Bank of America survey found that 78 percent of the American small-businesses responding to their recent survey “grew” (though the growth was unspecified) in the past year, with even higher percentages for businesses with Black and Hispanic owners. U.S. Bank’s Small Business Perspective survey found that 73 percent of small businesses have also “grown” in the last year — again, with no amount specified.
But the National Federation of Independent Businesses,........