I'm John Bachelor. Small Business America, I welcome the Small Business America columnist, an observer of

the scene, always close at hand. The small businesses of America are the future. That's where all the

employees are for the future. That's where the inventors of the future. That's our growth, small business.

And Gene Marks is a small business columnist for the Guardian newspaper, the UK edition, the U.S. edition.

He writes for distinguished publications across America, especially our hometown newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer.

And Gene, your article most recently in Medium identifies something I've been meaning to get to with you for some time

because I report on Lancaster County and Pennsylvania. The economy is doing fine on Main Street,

Gene. Just fine. Good evening to you. Hi, John. Yeah, you know, so this is a piece, actually,

I reposted on my Medium account, but it originally appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

I actually, I was on Fox News this past weekend talking about the exact same topic.

You know, John, it is, how can I say this?

Like, I do a fair amount of like TV appearances.

And yet over the past six months or so, I noticed not as much as I normally do because the producers aren't reaching out to me because they know that I cover small and mid-sized businesses and they want to have me on when there's bad news to share.

You know, like during COVID and, you know, you know, we're down economies.

I'm getting asked all the time.

That to me is a real indicator, a real metric about what's really going on with small businesses

in 2026.

When the media doesn't really want to talk about them, when you don't hear that much about

them, pretty much means that nothing bad is going on with small businesses.

And that is the truth

as we are midway through this year. When I go out and I speak to industry groups around the country,

as you and I have discussed previously, you know, people can go back into the archives of the show

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