NEW YORK, NY — American Express on Saturday celebrated the 16th annual Small Business Saturday, a national holiday it invented in 2010 to encourage Americans to shop at the merchants who pay it 3.5% of every transaction.
The campaign — backed by an estimated $40 million in television, transit, and digital spend — directed consumers toward neighborhood bakeries, bookstores, and hardware shops, all of whom are charged the highest swipe fees of any card network operating in the United States. Amex stock closed Friday at a 52-week high.
“We were thrilled to be featured on the Shop Small map,” said Diane Reyes, owner of Bird & Crumb Bakery in Northampton, MA, gesturing at a Verifone terminal still humming next to a tray of half-glazed cardamom buns. “We did about $4,200 in sales today, and somewhere around $147 of it just left for a building in Manhattan.”
The official Shop Small map, accessible only inside the Amex app, lists 11,400 participating businesses nationwide. A spot check Saturday morning found three of the top featured “local heroes” in major metro areas — a juice bar in Austin, a coffee roaster in Brooklyn, and a stationery boutique in Pasadena — were portfolio companies of private equity funds with reported assets above $4 billion.
Internal projections at Amex estimate Saturday’s surge in foot traffic will route an additional $24 million in interchange fees through the network, a figure the company describes in marketing materials as “support flowing back to local communities,” without specifying which community 200 Vesey Street belongs to.
The holiday’s signature offering, the Shop Small cardholder rebate, returns $10 to qualifying spenders after a $10 purchase — a promotion partially funded by the merchant whose terminal processed the swipe. A senior Amex strategist, speaking on background as a Bloomberg terminal behind him cycled through Q4 OpEx slides, called the structure “a flywheel” and then asked the reporter to confirm the recording app was off.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), who has spent 14 years trying to cap interchange fees, issued a statement Saturday afternoon that nobody read because it was Saturday afternoon.
Amex CEO Stephen Squeri, asked at a fall investor conference whether Small Business Saturday was a genuine philanthropic effort or a marketing engine, said the two were “not in tension.” The room laughed in the way rooms laugh when they own the stock.
At Bird & Crumb, the last cardamom bun went around 4:15 p.m. Reyes ran the sale, watched the printer cough out a receipt, and slid the merchant copy into a three-ring binder she has labeled, in blue Sharpie, taxes-but-also-grief.