Why Not Shop Small?

September 17, 2026By Tasha Monroe

The billionaires will be fine.

There are a few companies in America that do not need any help reminding you they exist.

You know them. They know you. They know what you searched for at 11:47 p.m., what you left in your cart, what size you probably wear, and perhaps what emotional state you were in when you added the third candle you absolutely did not need.

They are doing fine.

Small businesses, comparatively, usually have a person.

Sometimes that person is packing your order at the same table where they had breakfast. Sometimes they are answering customer emails while reheating coffee for the third time. Sometimes they are photographing products, writing copy, updating a website, chasing a vendor, figuring out shipping, reading tax guidance they deeply resent, and asking themselves whether they remembered to eat lunch.

I know this because I am one of them.

Simply Edyn & Co. is now in its third year, and lately I have been thinking more about what it means to spend with intention. Not perfectly. Absolutely not perfectly. I shop at big companies too. Sometimes they have the price I can afford, the thing I need, or the delivery speed my life requires. I am not going to sit here and pretend I have never whispered “thank God” when a package arrived the next morning.

But if I am already going to spend the money, I have started asking myself a very simple question:

Could this purchase land somewhere smaller?

That is really all I mean by Why Not Shop Small?

This is not a challenge. There is no pledge. No virtue badge. No public spreadsheet tracking whether you bought your paper towels from the morally correct source.

People are already carrying enough.

Rent is high. Groceries are high. People are dealing with layoffs, caregiving, illness, debt, kids, aging parents, and the strange economic experience of earning money only to watch it immediately leave the house wearing a tiny hat.

So no, guilt is not the point.

Attention is.

Large companies have become incredibly good at making themselves the automatic choice. One click. Free shipping. Familiar app. Saved card. Done.

That convenience is real, and sometimes it is exactly what we need.

But automatic choices add up.

A fifty-dollar purchase will not cause a Fortune 500 company to gather in the conference room and announce that Tasha Monroe has saved Q4.

At a tiny business, though, fifty dollars can actually register.

It might cover software. Packaging. A reorder. Shipping supplies. A vendor invoice. Gas. Groceries. Or simply give a business owner the small but very necessary confirmation that the thing they built is not floating alone in the void.

That is not sentimentality. It is just scale.

And I think scale matters.

Small businesses make life less beige.

They are where weird little ideas survive. Where somebody decides the world needs a bookstore with a very specific point of view, a bakery making the one pastry nobody else bothers with, a clothing shop with actual taste, a ceramicist making bowls that do not look like they came from an airport lounge, or a woman building an online lifestyle store from a very interesting brain and a nervous system that has chosen chaos.

Small businesses give us texture.

They also give us more choices about who we are supporting and what kind of work we want to keep around.

So during these one hundred days leading into Christmas, alongside Simply Edyn & Co.’s Do Not Go Numb: 100 Days of Relief, I am adding another little practice: