From the Publisher
A remarkable book. Rivlin re-creates the panic and heartbreak of small-business owners in the time of COVID, touching on everything from staffing issues to governmental hypocrisy to citizen rage, and always with an unwavering novelist’s eye. The result is the story of the way we live now: divided, shell-shocked, and picking up the pieces as best we can.” — Joshua Ferris, author of A Calling for Charlie Barnes
“Everything you think you know about small business in America will be upended in this surprising and inspiring investigation of America’s Main Streets. You’ll be introduced to a remarkable, resilient group of small-business owners who somehow kept going through COVID. These are true entrepreneurs—far from the epicenter of Silicon Valley, but they know how to move quickly, pivot, and adapt to keep their enterprises alive.” — Charles Duhigg, author of bestsellers The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better
“Gary Rivlin isn’t just a terrific journalist, he is an unusually empathetic one, who always gives readers a powerful sense of what his subjects are feeling and hoping and praying. It is this quality that makes Saving Main Street such a beautiful, memorable book. His stories of small-business people trying to survive the pandemic will break your heart—and fill you with joy.” — Joe Nocera, coauthor of All the Devils Are Here
"Compelling stories at the intersection of entrepreneurial aspirations, personal obligations, and public policy." — Kirkus Reviews
Kirkus Reviews
2022-08-12
A Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist reports on how small-business owners in northeast Pennsylvania—and one in New York City—weathered the challenges posed by the pandemic.
In the best of times, running a small business is a precarious proposition; the pandemic made it nearly impossible. In early 2020, Rivlin, author of Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc.―How the Working Poor Became Big Business, among other books, set out to document how a handful of businesses dealt with the precipitous decline in customers, unrelenting mortgage and utility bills, and costs that escalated as supply chains faltered. Among others, these include Vilma’s Hair Salon, Cusumano’s Italian restaurant, Lech’s Pharmacy, J.R.’s Hallmark, and Sol Cacao, a chocolate bar business. During the pandemic, owners worried about their employees and rethought their businesses. They navigated shifting shutdown orders and mask mandates and applied for financial assistance from the federal and state governments. Making matters worse was the lack of a “coordinated federal plan”; each state made its own rules. In addition, there were the constant threats posed by large restaurant and pharmaceutical chains, retail behemoths such as Walmart, and, of course, Amazon. These large corporations not only undercut their prices; they also gutted the downtown centers that brought in customers. Politicians might celebrate small businesses for being essential to living in a community and for embodying the independent spirit that ostensibly defines the American character, but economic policy always favors big business. That many businesses survived was due, in part, to the loyalty of employees and customers, the support of local business associations, and governmental grants and loans that carried them through the worst of the pandemic. For Rivlin, though, most important were business owners’ “creativity and fortitude,” the tenacity and improvisational talent to get the job done.
Compelling stories at the intersection of entrepreneurial aspirations, personal obligations, and public policy.
