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As the year-end holidays creep ever closer -- along with the beefed-up consumer spending that generally goes along with them -- businesses already are knee-deep in the annual task of trying to improve their appeal to everyone who will be spending money.
As the weeks ahead approach and pass, some businesses will be relying on successful strategies of the past that allowed them to capitalize on customers' buying preferences and loyalties.
However, for many others, the current uncertain national economy poses challenges that will test merchants' best instincts, as well as their abilities to adapt to what certainly will be about three months of changing economic conditions.
As daunting as some of those challenges might seem, the lessons that some merchants will learn might provide a great foundation for many years of successes in the future.
For those whose responses to difficulties and challenges this year might be anemic, the future probably will be best described as being on shaky ground.
An important factor to short- and long-term stability will be companies' ability to find enough workers, especially with the holidays less than three full months ahead.
The Wall Street Journal, in a front-page article last Tuesday, noted that with the economy weakening, many big companies have been cutting jobs or freezing hiring, yet many small businesses are experiencing difficulty hiring enough workers, with some companies having to resort to creative ways to get noticed by those jobless people who are willing to work.
All of that, for small businesses, is in place for an economic landscape in which a third of all businesses surveyed said hiring challenges had worsened in the three months that ended Sept. 1.
That situation resulted in 60% of small companies reporting that worker shortages are affecting their ability to operate at full capacity -- a problem that could prove damning in a busy holidays scenario.
Such information should serve as a wake-up for businesses in the six-county Southern Alleghenies region to go above and beyond what they chose to do in past years, perhaps when challenges weren't as daunting.
Some creative ideas might be able to be pursued individually while others might need cooperation from a number of entities.
Chambers of commerce in the region could be great coordinating bodies for brainstorming on how best to entice people to worker rolls, both seasonally and full time. Looking beyond this region, area companies and groups of entities need to pay attention to how others across the United States are responding to worker-shortage challenges.
Not all strategies being tried involve substantially higher pay, retention bonuses and benefit increases. For example, some involve training that could be a steppingstone to greater opportunities in myriad other ways during one's work life.
Consider the Des Moines, Iowa, contractor that plans to create its own training school to provide three months of instruction in construction basics, or the Georgia plumbing company that built a camera system that enables junior plumbers to live stream their work while another more experienced plumber supervises from the office.
Product-availability strategies might be one possibility for a group of small retailers operating in close proximity to one another.Small businesses shouldn't allow the coming months to be wasted; that's the bottom line.