Could the nation’s continued job growth soon be stunted as part of the current inflation spike’s collateral damage?
Bankrate.com’s Mark Hamrick told Newell Normand on WWL Radio that that’s a very real concern.
“The small businesses of today are obviously the larger businesses of tomorrow,” Hamrick said. “They can be the ones that possess the next great idea or the next great product. We need them to be vibrant and robust for all kinds of reasons.”
Hamrick said it’s important that the economy work for businesses of all sizes, not just massive corporate interests.
“We don’t want to have the kind of economy where only giant companies triumph, for all kinds of reasons,” he said. “We need to have good small enterprise job creation.”
Hamrick’s concern is that job growth might slow for small businesses, as they have less leeway financially to weather a price hike that might be rejected by the marketplace.
“You think about how many companies have basically publicly announced, ‘Hey we’re going to pay people more.’ And those are the companies that have the deepest pockets or the greater flexibility to do that,” he said.
Because of that, Hamrick said that job growth could very well see a slowdown for companies that aren’t giant corporate entities.
“You can imagine also that there are smaller enterprises, whether it’s a restaurant or they make something, whatever sort of space they occupy they may not feel like they have the flexibility to raise their prices to cover their costs,” Hamrick said. “And therefore, it’s more difficult for them to then add employees to raise the output or just keep output where it had been.”
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