Time for businesses to object

The last week has not been good for small businesses in our part of the state.

The U.S. Postal Service began slowing “snail mail” services. Stores were ordered to stop using plastic bags and required to make their paying customers pay for a paper bag. And the state announced the minimum wage would jump to $14.49 per hour Jan. 1.

If you don’t own or manage a business, this may seem overly dramatic.

Who cares if it takes an extra day for your mail to arrive, right? It’s only 8 cents for a paper bag. And people deserve to make more money on the job.

It’s not that simple.

Local businesses that sell goods or provide services to government agencies and national companies generally have to wait at least a month – quite often 60 or 90 days or more – to get paid. So, adding a day or two more to payment delivery time may mean a lack of cash flow to pay local bills.

The city won’t wait 90 days for a water bill payment. A utility company won’t wait 90 days to pay the electric bill. And employees need a check on time to pay their bills.

Where does that leave a local business? Struggling.

And what about that plastic versus paper issue?

To see what it means, go shop in a small store in one of our rural communities where residents live paycheck to paycheck. In stores in Medical Lake, Tekoa, Ritzville, Davenport and other places, residents literally counting their pennies to pay for their purchases. To you and me, it may be only 8 cents per bag. But to many fixed-income residents, it’s a tax that’s creating an extra financial burden. And our small retailers feel that burden when a resident has to put something back on the shelf.

While I am not a fan of the cheap plastic bags stores have been providing customers the last 30 years, there isn’t a need for the state to order businesses to charge customers for paper bags. Instead of creating a larger state bureaucracy in Olympia to collect and spend paper bag funds, it makes more sense for the state to live within a budget – just like small businesses have to do. Cut costs, reduce the ranks of expensive state workers and slash taxes and fees on small business.

Then there’s the 80-cent hike in the minimum wage coming Jan. 1. As of the beginning of the year, the state will have nearly reached the $15 per hour minimum wage economic novices have been pushing for years. And it’ll be about double the minimum wage of neighboring Idaho.

We’re already feeling the effects of that effort to drive up minimum wages.

Some grocery store products are deceptively packaged to reduce the amount of contents. Mom-and-pop shops have cut back hours for their employees. Costs – and inflation – are skyrocketing. And “training” jobs for teenagers are drying up. Raises, too, have all but been eliminated for seasoned workers in many small businesses.

Any one of those government-ordered policies are enough for owners to question their small businesses’ financial viability. But to top it off, on Monday, Oct. 4, the deadline passed for state, education and health care workers to get a coronavirus vaccine in time to avoid the governor’s get shot or get fired mandate.

Oct. 4 was the last day to get inoculated and be considered “fully vaccinated” by the governor’s Oct. 18 deadline.

As people leave those jobs, our communities are less safe. Our students are less educated. And the wait in the doctor’s office gets longer. The reduced safety and reduced education results in even higher business costs for safety, security and qualified dependable employees.

Clearly, the one-size-fits-all mandates from Olympia aren’t good for small business in Eastern Washington.

Our small businesses are already struggling after more than 19 months of coronavirus-related shutdown orders. These new rules and requirements are going to make it even more to survive.

Rep. Jenny Graham and I sat down Tuesday to talk about those and other issues. Graham, a Republican who represents the 6th Legislative District, is making the rounds gathering data on the real impact Olympia’s over-reaching regulations are having east of the Cascades.

I’m sure I gave her an earful. And I know she listened.

But, as she pointed out, a single lawmaker won’t be able to change things in Olympia. To ease the challenges facing small businesses here, Graham said business owners need to stand up to the over-reaching regulations.

Small business owners and managers need to be very vocal in their opposition to what’s destroying their livelihoods, she said.

Owners – and concerned residents – need to show up en masse at local, county and state government meetings, both in person and online. She said they need to make sure elected and appointed public employees hear them, and then act.

She’s right.

The time is now, if small businesses want to head off more damaging policies likely to come up in the next legislative session.

Roger Harnack is the publisher of Free Press Publishing. Email him at [email protected].