JEFFERSON — The Jefferson Area Chamber of Commerce is having a small business passport contest into early December.
Passports will be given out starting Saturday, at the chamber tent at the Winter Craft market.
Throughout next week, passports can be found at the Full Auto Sales and Repair in Jefferson and the What Knot Shoppe in Austinburg.
The auto shop is located at 55 South Chestnut St., and What Knot is at 2806 Route 307.
Each passport will be lined with various Jefferson-area businesses, which contestants can get stamped.
Contestants will have until 5 p.m. Dec. 6 to return passports to Full Auto Sales and Repair.
Contestants will then be given raffle tickets, depending on how many stamps they obtained.
Winners will be announced at the Jefferson Christmas parade Dec. 7.
Full Auto owner and Chamber President-Elect Shane Bryson said the passport contest used to last one day.
“It made it to where, there wasn’t as many people doing it because [it’s] a lot, especially if it’s cold out,” he said.
Chamber board member Jennifer Lawrence was one of the main people working on the passport.
Lawrence said this was her first year working on the passport.
“I got to go around and talk to the different businesses and meet with them face to face,” she said. “This was new for me.”
Chamber President John Szewczyk said it’s important to shop at and promote small businesses, to show community support.
“Everyone wants to go to the big stores,” he said.
Szewczyk said small businesses have a hard time surviving because of larger corporations and online shopping.
Lawrence said she hadn’t met many of the business owners before working with them in the passport.
“When you have communities like Jefferson, those communities thrive based on the small businesses,” she said. “I love small towns. I love that unique feel of the different shops.”
Lawrence said the unique shops give communities like Jefferson its economy and culture.
Bryson said events like the passport contest help businesses recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We were one of the essential businesses, technically,” he said. “We stayed open, but we had a huge decline in sales obviously, because people were not getting out there.”
Bryson said the pandemic altered shopping habits.
“We had to change our whole model of how we did business with people,” he said. “For a while, we were trying to do as much as we could with payments over the phone.”
Bryson said a few weeks can hit small business’ success.
“It’s not just because of COVID,” he said. “It’s also the economy, a whole combination of [things]. It’s not been fully able to recover, before something else happens that kind of drags us smaller towns down.”
Bryson said Jefferson does better when its local business do better.
“Our town always recovers pretty well and does pretty good,” he said. “There is still organizations like [the chamber] and other ones that are trying to help and doing more.”
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