Day 7: Choose Kindness. Every Single Time.

Today's episode picks up with Part 2 of my Rebecca story...

Picture this: We drove two hours to a huge purse sale only to discover a line so long we'd have to wait four hours just to get inside. Nope. Not happening! 😂

Instead, we did what good friends do—we pivoted. We wandered through a thrift store, grabbed something to eat, laughed, talked, and simply enjoyed each other's company. Looking back, I wouldn't trade that day for all the discounted purses in the world. Sometimes the best memories are made when the original plan falls apart.

Then...I climb up on my soapbox.

After seeing someone publicly tear down a brand-new local small business on social media, I couldn't stay quiet. As someone who spent twelve years owning a small business, I can promise you this: the owner already knows every mistake that's been made. They're already carrying the weight. What they probably need today isn't another public criticism—they need a little grace and encouragement.

I know the sleepless nights, the financial stress, the sacrifices, and the emotional investment that go into opening those doors every single day. Small business owners don't just invest their money—they invest their hearts.

Here's my challenge: Before leaving a negative comment online, remember there's a real person behind that business. Someone who is doing everything they can to keep their dream alive.

Better yet, think of a local small business you love. Leave them a five-star review. Comment on one of their Facebook posts. Share one of their posts with your friends. Those simple acts of kindness can reach far more people than you realize, and they can mean the world to the owner.

We all have enough critics in this world. Let's become someone's encourager instead.

Thanks for spending 10 unedited minutes with me today. ❤️

Transcript

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Good morning everyone. Welcome to another edition of 10 unedited minutes with Marlena. Uh it is Thursday, June 25th. Um Yeah, I feel like my mind is a little like array today, but I've been I've been working on these uh different cam camera angles for this podcast and for uh my YouTube um video of this podcast. Anyway, let's get started. Today's episode is sponsored by my dear friend Rebecca Conklin Kleibomer. Um if you've been following along, you already know that she has graciously sponsored two months worth of my podcast, and I am honoring her with 60 days of Rebecca Memories. So yesterday we talked about um how Rebecca and I was took a road trip to Fort Wayne for the Vera Bradley um outlet sale. And for those of you that don't know uh Vera Bradley, um they're bags, they're purses, and I love them. They're beautiful, and I um have quite a few. Anyway, um, long story short, Rebecca agreed to go to this outlet sale with me. They hold this sale once a year in Fort Wayne. I don't think they do it anymore. Um, maybe they do, I don't know, honestly. But it it's like a two-hour drive for us to get there. And um, we were excited about the road trip. So yesterday's memory was while we were in the car driving there, and um, today is part two of that memory. So we get to the Coliseum, that's where it was, and we're driving around and we pull into the parking lot, and Rebecca's like, holy moly, there are a ton of people here. And I said, Yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty popular, Rebecca. So there's these ladies like walking out to their car, and Rebecca rolls her window down and she says, Um, where do we go in? Like, where do we line up? And the ladies said, Oh, they point us in the right direction. And they said, But by the way, it's a long line to get in. And Rebecca goes, How long? And they said, Well, we stood in line for four hours. And she looked at me and she goes, I love you, Marlena, but I don't love you enough to stand. Well, she didn't say I don't love you enough. She said, I don't want to stand in line for four hours. And I said, Yeah, I don't know that I do either. So what did we do? Instead of going into the um outlet sale, we find a thrift store right across the road, and I was able to find a Vera Bradley uh person there, and then we went out to eat. And I'm not sure where we went out to eat, but I do remember we just sat and just talked and had a good time. I think we were in that restaurant for probably a couple hours, but it was it was a good time and um one of the best memories with Rebecca. Scaring the shit out of her on the way there and then driving for two hours, four hours there and back, and not even going into the actual destination. So she's great. Anyway, thank you, Rebecca, for sponsoring this podcast. I am so grateful for you and I love you dearly. And if you guys, if somebody else wants to sponsor me, I would love it. Um, it's a $25 per month investment, and that just basically covers my cost, my monthly subscription to BuzzSprout, which is the platform that I use to push this podcast out to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Prime Music, all the good ones. And then as you can see, if you're on YouTube, you can see that I also stream it there. And speaking of YouTube, I've been like dancing around with this camera these last couple days, just trying to get a better, different angle because I feel like in the past, I feel like I have been like looking out the window, which I do. I love looking out my window right here, but I also want to have more of my face on my YouTube videos. So I don't know why, it's just this little quirky thing. So I probably spent a good 30 minutes rearranging my entire desk and moving this camera around to different places and getting a good shot. So let me know. If you're on YouTube, let me know. Is this a good shot? I don't know. Yesterday it was right in front of my face, and that was a little too invasive for me. But um anyway, let's get into today's topics. So I have a I have a couple topics I want to address. And the first one is just an off-the-cuff um reaction that I'm having to something that I saw on Facebook. And as you all know, I am a small business owner. I ran a meat market deli in a bakery for 12 years. I own that, and that was uh right in the heart of Bluffton on Main Street. And then I also have created my own marketing and small business consulting company called Hook and Rise Uh Creative. So entrepreneurial ship is in my blood, in my heart, and um I love it. And I think small businesses are important for our local, hyperlocal, and in our overall uh national economy. And if you start looking at statistics, um it's a pretty high percentage of companies in this country started out as a small business, probably in somebody's garage or somebody's spare bedroom or somebody's kitchen. So when I see somebody on social media um attacking another small business, instantly, instantly, anger bubbles up into my stomach. And yesterday um I saw a negative comment towards one of our local small businesses here in Bluffton. And yes, I'm gonna call it out because I want to give this company a shout out because I love them. I love the owners. We have um always been friends, collaborated in the past, and um every time we see each other, we'll stop and chat for a good 30 minutes just because they're great people, right? So there's a new restaurant in Bluffton. It's called Pizza Arcadia, and this restaurant is right around the corner from where my uh meat market was, and um it's great. It is a gourmet pizza restaurant. Um, it's owned by um three. If I I hope I have this right, but I think three people went together and own it. And two of them are from not in this area, but they are pizza connoisseurs, right? They're one I'm pretty sure is a chef from Chicago, so they know their pizza, right? And I ate there for the first time last week. We had a uh women's business networking group meet up there, and um, I got to enjoy their pizza. And one of the other women in that group like challenged us all to try a new flavor of pizza, and it was so good. It was their tomato pie. I added um pepperoni. Well, I didn't, but a couple of us wanted pepperoni on it, so we had them add pepperoni to it, and it was oh, it was amazing. The crust was thin and crispy. It was like the New York, they said it was like the New York style pizza, so it was very good. And then I think the star of the show was the appetizer, and that was the whipped ricotta cheese. So every appetizer comes with breadsticks, and then it's a dip that they give with it, and it was this whipped ricotta flavored with garlic, and then they drizzled local honey over the top, and boy was it amazing! It was so good. Um, and then we got one of their chopped salads, so good as well. Everything we got there was delicious. So the thing is though, um, they only open on the weekends, and I think that they are being very smart and intentional about how they're opening this this restaurant because they want to get it right. Okay, so they're only open Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday in the evenings, and word on the street says you have to get there right away because they only make a certain amount of dough, and then once they run out, they're done, right? And the reason for that is because they want to perfect this dough recipe and um um get it right. So they're making it in small batches, testing it, and then once they get it right, they'll create larger batches. So as a result, you it's it's dine-in only right now. So you cannot um order, call them up and say, Hey, I want to order pizza and come in and pick it up. However, I've I saw people, and this is a good idea. They walk in there, they sit down at their bar, and they have a nice glass of wine or a drink and order a pizza, asked to put it in a box and then take it home. That's great, right? What a great idea. And also they are patronizing a little extra by having a drink, and I think that's great. So we have a Facebook page that um is local to Bluffton, and anytime somebody has a question about Bluffton or wants to, you know, um share a community event, they put it on this Facebook page. And so somebody was innocently asking if Pizza Arcadia was offering carry out yet. They were nice about it, it was a very professional post. Um, some people went on there and explained, no, they're not doing it yet. This is why. You know, all very nice until this one lady gets on there and completely rudely just says, I don't understand a pizza place, how they can have boxes for their employee, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever, but they can't have boxes for their customers. And I'm just like, first of all, I feel like I I know this person has tried to blast my main street company um one time and I set them straight. Second of all, I have yet to see I I don't think I've ever seen their face in my business. And thirdly, I doubt that they visited this pizza place either because they would have known. If you're gonna sit there and make negative comments on social media about a small business before you do that, how about you go patronize that business, maybe have a conversation with the owner, and then you will hear firsthand why they are offering takeout. Not a bad idea, right? Instead of just bashing them on social media, small business owners, we have enough on our plate. We have enough to worry about. We don't need people blasting us on social media. And there's there's another one that really upset me too, and it's also pizza. I don't know what the deal is with uh people thinking they can bash um pizza places this week on social media, but um there's another uh company, and this one's not in Bluffton, they are more in the Finlay area, and it's called Jack and Doe's Pizza, another amazing pizza place. They've been in business for several years, and they've kind of taken a local approach to franchising. So they have, I don't know if they're franchises, honestly, but they have several different locations. And um somebody, I didn't see the actual post, I just saw Jack and Doe's response to it and gathered the clues from there. But somebody ordered a sub sandwich from them and they got uh banana peppers put on them. And the banana peppers still had the seeds on the pieces that they put on the sandwich. And the person that got it apparently can't tell the difference between a seed and a maggot because they thought they were maggots on their sandwich. And I'm like, okay, I saw the picture and definitely you can see that it was a seed. How about you like at least take a fork and poke at it before you take a picture of it and blast it on uh social media about a small business having bugs on their sandwiches? Like, that is terrible, terrible. And the people that do that have no idea what a small business owner goes through on a daily basis. Again, we have so much on our plate. Listen, yesterday I said this. I have done everything from plumbing to repairs to book work to running the day-to-day operations of my business, and that's what small business owners do on a daily basis. We have enough to worry about. Please be kind, be nice, put a positive comment on social media about our company, have that go viral instead of a negative comment that everybody's gonna hop on the bandwagon for. I will say Bluffton really did rally around uh Pizza Arcadia about that comment on their social media page, and I I was glad to see that. And they've done the same for me when people have left uh negative comments on my social media pages about my former company, and I've even had friends tell me that they have personally reached out to people who have put negative comments on um social media about my company. So I'm grateful that um I'm grateful for the people who do support small businesses, I'm grateful for the owners who have stuck it out this far in uh continuing their small business, and um it's a lot of work. Just know that you are seen. We are grateful for you. And if you are not a small business owner, please just patronize another small business owner regularly. Even if you spend 20 bucks, that 20 bucks is is could be $20 that set them over their goal that day. You know, there's just you guys, I can't say enough about patronizing small business owners. So I didn't get into everything I wanted to get into today because I went off on that tangent. But anyway, we're gonna end it here today. Um, tomorrow, maybe we'll talk about the documentary that I watched um two days ago that still has me completely fucked up. But um, yeah. Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting my podcast, Rebecca. Thank you for being an absolutely amazing friend. I am having so much fun uh reminiscing about our friendship, and there's so much more in store. I cannot wait for you to hear it. And again, thank you guys for sponsoring this podcast. I love you. Pray for me. I pray for you every single day, and we'll see you tomorrow. Bye.