Keep it Oakland: e-commerce meets social justice

In Oakland, California, small-scale merchants adapted to Covid-19 shelter-in-place protocols by turning to digital platforms, combining social activism with commercial pleas. Focusing on the Oakland Indie Alliance – a coalition of independent small business owners – I show how these dynamics played out in a city known not only for tech-based gentrification and police violence, but a rich history of radical activism, from dock worker unions and the Black Panthers to Occupy Oakland.

The Oakland Indie Alliance’s response to the pandemic reflects an intensification of platformization processes that were already in motion. In my larger work, I situate shop owners’ use of platforms during shelter-in-place in longer histories of colonial dispossession, redlining, gentrification, and tech-related displacement as well as radical activism in Oakland (McElroy and Werth, 2019; Maharawal, 2017; Nelson, 2013; Turner, 2006) juxtaposed with larger processes of platformization, gig labor, and tech-driven legislation in the San Francisco Bay Area (Dubal, 2017; McNeill, 2016). Existing inequalities between Black-owned businesses and indie stores associated with the “new” gentrified Oakland are exacerbated by stores’ reliance on digital platforms to stay open, reaching local and globally dispersed customers. But Oakland’s history as a radical Black city also created new opportunities for Black-owned businesses and involved shop owners in social justice work, especially after the June 2020 uprising. Through open-ended interviews with shop owners and clerks, and textual analysis of #KeepitOakland Instagram posts and the Oakland Indie Alliance website along with its Keep it Caring COVID Recovery Fund and Repair Fund, I provide a snapshot of how small indie businesses are making platforms, which were not designed with their needs in mind, work for them. Through a variety of platforms and remediated labor practices, indie shop owners both rematerialize their digital storefronts and strategically participate in social justice movements.

In many places in the US and around the world, in-person shopping in non-essential businesses was suspended during shelter-in-place. In California in general and Alameda County in particular, the rules around business closures were especially stringent: Small retailers could not allow any customers inside until June 2020. Thus, between March and June 2020, many Oakland businesses had difficulty paying their exorbitant rent ($5000 USD is standard monthly rent for a storefront in high-end commercial districts) and permanently closed (Image 1). Shops became entirely dependent on e-commerce, bolstered by social media engagement. In Oakland as elsewhere, some shops switched to curbside pickup and local delivery. Others honed their social media marketing strategies to draw in customers near and far by selling new services.

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Image 1.

Tribute to Issues on Piedmont Avenue in Oakland, which closed in May 2020. Note advises them to “Set up a Kickstarter/GoFundMe” (photo by author).

For example, one high-end salon leveraged their large Instagram following to post influencer-style updates, with stylists performing self-haircuts or sharing haircuts performed on glamorous customers of days past, in a kind of “throwback Thursday” documentation. Stylists offered personal video tutorials to help customers cut their own hair, or at least their own bangs. Such tutorials went for $100–$300, depending on the stylist, and mimicked TikTok or YouTube beauty influencer tutorials. In one Instagram post, the salon writes, “Who wants to cut their own bangs????? Our salon has been closed for 5 months and we have decided to walk you guys through your own one on one personalized face framing class. Spend an hour on zoom with a. . .stylist and learn skills to keep things soft and cute. Add yourself to our email list ASAP to be notified when books open for these appointments. Spots will be very limited but we are really excited to see you again even if it’s through a screen!” This post points to the exclusive nature of their tutorials, and the importance of customers maintaining their aesthetic even during shelter-in-place. Meanwhile, through interviews with local merchants, I found that Black-owned salons and beauty shops without social media followings did not have the same opportunities for earning money while physically closed.

Such practices are related to existing e-commerce and retail norms, as well as broader processes of the platformization of cultural production. As Nieborg et al. (2020) argue, the Covid-19 crisis has exacerbated trends that were already underway: “Platform markets remain driven by a winner-takes-all logic, even in a time of crisis. Or perhaps, especially so in a time of crisis.” For cultural producers, from TikTok influencers to fashion bloggers, an aura of authenticity is vital to their livelihood (Duffy and Hund, 2015; Duffy et al., 2021; Marwick, 2013). Cultural workers have long been precarious and have become increasingly dependent upon commercial platforms. Small retailers with brick-and-mortar locations use social media along with commercial platforms to attract and retain customers, balancing personal posts with enticing images of new merchandise (Kneese & Palm, 2020). As I have found through my interviews with shop workers, shifting sales online encompasses new forms of labor, as staff must message with customers and inform them of the condition of items, their price, or other details, and receive payment and shipping information through payment processors. This expands sales timelines so that clerks interface with customers long after their working hours are over, continuing conversations while logged into store accounts on their personal devices while at home, off the clock.

Developing the skills needed to run a digital storefront may worsen inequalities, as knowing how to write for an online audience, navigate an online sales platform, and crafting a social media presence are not necessarily part of most shop workers’ repertoire. Similar to what Ticona and Mateescu (2018) found in their research on care workers navigating Care.com, this is especially true for merchants who are not secure in their writing skills, perhaps because of immigration status, education level, or inexperience with digital platforms. Not all shop owners are born writers or artistic photographers. Instead, they may be good at selecting items to sell, physically curating a shop, chatting with customers, and maintaining social relationships within a community setting. The skills needed to maintain an online store are not necessarily the same as the ones that keep a brick-and-mortar business alive (Kneese & Palm, 2020).

This kind of extended retail work is also gendered: It is often women who manage a store’s online presence. Some women shop owners said they felt awkward about posting anything too personal and tried to walk a fine line between being open and likeable with customers and oversharing. Posting about anything too negative, like annoying customers, shoplifters, or financial woes, might turn some customers off even if it made others more sympathetic. With the onset of the pandemic, it became more difficult for shop owners to balance home life and shop life, as selling tasks bled into family time, especially for sellers with young children who were home because of school and daycare closures.

During the pandemic, merchants depend upon such platforms to stay afloat when their physical shops are closed and perform much of this work from home, now photographing and sharing the processes behind production to maintain an aura of aspirational authenticity. On social media platforms, shop workers post images of their piles of neatly packaged online orders, ready to be shipped out. I refer to this as logistics fetishism, or the documented packing and shipping of merchandise on Instagram, which has increased during the pandemic because online sales are now critical. Logistics fetishism helps provide aesthetically pleasing content at a time when inventory is slowed. It also rematerializes the digital storefront. Without constant new goods to feature, or without photogenic customers in the shop itself, it is more difficult for sellers to generate new content. While shops are closed to browsers, shop workers take logistics-focused photographs while alone in their shop or even in their own homes, as apartments and garages have been converted into staging studios. The images provide a political angle (the United States Postal Service was decimated by the Trump administration) and highlight a business’s popularity while imbuing a networked, often invisible process with a sensuous aura, revealing the risky labor that shop workers carry out. Shop workers who ship items sometimes worry about the safety of standing in long lines at the post office. The pandemic has increased shipping times for many items and disrupted some global and national supply chains, so it is harder to keep items in stock. Some merchants have subsequently posted disclaimers on their websites, letting buyers know that shipping times may be longer than expected.

One indie record shop regularly posts images of its packaged sales, wrapped in protective cardboard and stacked in USPS boxes, to Instagram, demonstrating the store’s success and making visible the logistics behind its quick online sales. In one such post featuring dozens of records ready to ship out, the shop account writes, “We’re hard at work shipping orders all day every day! Hit the link in our profile to place an order and we’ll ship something to you too! All domestic orders over $50 ship for free when you order from us on Discogs. We ship worldwide and accommodate local pick up.” Again, the shop points to the global reach of their business while upholding their commitment to serving local customers. A small children’s boutique uses colorful ribbons, tissue paper, and cartoon bunnies in their packaging. The store’s account posted an image of colorfully packaged children’s toys and clothes on Instagram, writing, “Did you know if you come in to buy presents, we can also ship them for you? For a small fee, gifts can be packed up and shipped out (or free porch delivery if local) within a few days! Here are six of such in-store purchases waiting to be packed up for shipping on Monday! I mean, unless you really love going to the post office.” The owner is displaying the store’s popularity and also letting customers know that she will take on the additional labor associated with going to the post office during a pandemic. For both shops, shipping and delivery have become vital parts of their businesses and help them compete with larger-scale sellers, and especially in the case of the children’s boutique, megastores like Amazon and Target.

Merchants also rely on platform infrastructures to reach consumers. By pivoting to online sales facilitated by a constellation of e-commerce infrastructures like Shopify, dedicated sites like Esty and Discogs, crowdfunding campaigns, payment service providers (PSPs) like Square, PayPal, and Stripe, and social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook, new problems emerge. On a technical level, some shop owners, even those with some programing or design skills, told me how time intensive and difficult Shopify was to use, especially for people with one-of-a-kind vintage inventory. (For one shop owner, the backend of her site became visible to shoppers and showed items that were out of stock. Despite having previously worked at Google, she found it difficult to manage the shop website.) Other shops did not have a substantial social media presence before the pandemic and had trouble building a following.

The difficulty of online only sales led some merchants to take new risks. Curbside pickup was not technically legal in Oakland for several months, but many stores used it anyway. One pregnant shop owner continued to work and allowed limited numbers of shoppers in her store after June 2020, despite the personal health risk. Some merchants told me they worried about uneven policing and surveillance: Would they be fined, even if other merchants in the area were doing it? Considering Oakland’s history of police brutality, Black and Latinx shop owners were rightfully concerned about disproportionate enforcement – especially after some posters on Nextdoor started calling out specific businesses for appearing to be open during shelter-in-place.

Shop owners I interviewed mentioned various strategies they employed to keep customers invested in their stores, even if they were open with limited hours or shuttering their brick-and mortars. Some set up GoFundMe campaigns to pay for staff members’ salaries or overhead costs. Shops encouraged customers to buy gift certificates they could use later. Gift certificates acted as makeshift loans, as customers might wait until after the pandemic was over to apply their cards. Another strategy involved enticing customers with virtual consultations and specials, offering care packages, Zoom-ready blouse and earring sets, and curated gift selections that might appeal to the working-from-home crowd. Small businesses did this while also offering free shipping for all orders, despite the extra labor time and money needed to ship items during the pandemic.

An emphasis on material culture was a common denominator for many of the Oakland-based merchants and clerks I spoke to before the start of the pandemic. For instance, the Oakland Indie Alliance supplied paper maps with all of the #Keep It Oakland shops listed, highlighting women and Black, Latinx, or Asian-American-owned businesses. Shops carried postcards and flyers from other local businesses, and hosted in-shop events like art openings, readings, and popups, fomenting connections with other local artists, activists, and sellers. During the pandemic, independent stores have struggled to find ways of maintaining an aura of authenticity through their increasingly digital storefronts, focusing on cute packaging for shipped items or decorative electronic gift cards in order to conjure their indie, handmade status (Image 2).

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Image 2.

Starline Social Club postcard. Starline permanently closed after shifting to selling to-go cocktails during the pandemic. They plan to reopen in September 2021 as a worker-owned cooperative (photo by author).

The Oakland Indie Alliance provided some support to businesses grappling with these various problems, as did spinoff initiatives like #KeepOaklandAlive, which was funded by an altruistic tech worker who created a common website that allows shoppers to browse the digital storefronts of many indie Oakland shops, at least if the shops already had dedicated websites of their own to facilitate the links. Founded in 2014, the Oakland Indie Alliance represents “500 small-scale entrepreneurs who have united under a common goal of preserving Oakland’s variety, energy, and social fabric.” The group organized their own Covid recovery fund to assist businesses that were closed or otherwise hurting during shelter-in-place. Their Keep It Caring fund provided $10,000 grants to small businesses in the East Bay, particularly those that “add positive value to community health,” prioritizing BIPOC businesses. Some large “local” corporations like San Francisco-based Square donated money, but most of the Keep It Caring funds came from small donors, crowdfunding style. The average donation was around $70.

OIA used its substantial Instagram following through its “Keep It Oakland” campaign (close to 9000 followers) to draw attention to particular businesses, owners, and workers, and to raise money for its Keep It Caring fund. Keep It Oakland highlights Oakland teachers (who went on strike in 2019), Black Lives Matter, and self-care and mutual aid resources. During a time of converging crises, Keep It Oakland, with its #KeepItOakland hashtag, took a more political turn, connecting the support of local businesses and workers to broader racial and economic justice.

The Keep It Oakland movement is connected to longer histories of ethical consumption and small business social justice activism, including movements around Fair Trade, sustainability, and boycotting sweatshop labor or animal cruelty (Adams and Raisborough, 2008; Micheletti, 2003). There is also a related tradition of Black entrepreneurial activism in the US, including Black women’s beauty shops as activist spaces in the mid-20th century (Gill, 2010). The Keep It Oakland movement builds on both these traditions and the larger realm of hashtag activism (Jackson et al., 2020). Just as some brands attempted to commodify the larger pandemic crisis by calling attention to themselves on social media by pretending to extend care to marginalized communities (Sobande, 2020), larger brands also capitalized on the renewed BLM protests. For example, Blackout Tuesday in 2020 drowned out important activist-related information about #Black Lives Matter protests, flooding Instagram with pointless black squares (Vincent, 2020).

But some business owners did use their social media followings and resources to advocate for social justice and mutual aid. In Oakland, as in many other cities across the US and around the world, the June 2020 protests following George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police led some community members and local businesses to materially support protestors, providing PPE, food, and other necessities. Some Oakland shops posted about the protests and featured images of the PPE they were handing out to protests outside their storefront or posted images of their mutual aid runs at Omni Commons, an Oakland anarchist hub. One record store closed their physical location in March 2020, but came back to their brick-and-mortar to distribute paper bags with facemasks, snacks, and water bottles to protestors. Shops used their social media accounts to bolster Black-owned businesses and activist organizations, contribute to mutual aid and bail funds, and post about racial injustice. Across social media platforms, there was a sometimes awkward balance between mutual aid and social justice on the one hand and consumerism and the attention economy on the other.

Histories of policing, redlining, and unfair lending practices have determined how Oakland businesses fare during the pandemic. The City of Oakland is often teetering on bankruptcy, despite an influx of wealth from the tech sector. Instead of funneling resources into local schools, businesses, or the community, the city spends a large percentage – 44% – of its budget on the police (ABC News, 2020). The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans connected to the CARES Act left out many Black-owned businesses. Because banks were used as middlemen, historically contingent structural inequalities impacted businesses’ credit ratings and their relationship with big banks. Marginalized Black-owned businesses were less likely to have connections to major banks, whereas larger retail and restaurant chains had legal teams able and willing to help them work the system (Popken, 2020). Allowing banks to prioritize certain applicants means that systemic bias will be a factor, which is why the bulk of PPP funds went to large companies (Wood and Friedline, 2021). Newer platforms offer loans to Black-owned businesses in what McMillan Cottom (2020) refers to as “predatory inclusion.” She calls out companies like PayPal, Kabbage, and Square for their micro-business and platform entrepreneur business loans that resemble predatory cash advances (McMillan Cottom, 2020). New payment platforms are capitalizing on the historical marginalization of Black women, who are less likely to be seen as worthy investments or receive substantial bank-backed loans. Keep It Oakland hashtags thus tied racial justice to Black-owned businesses, highlighting crowdfunding platform donations and shopping local as ways of giving back to the community and empowering Black entrepreneurs.

Many posts from the Keep It Oakland page combine support for Black-owned shops with references to racial justice. Other Black entrepreneurs featured on the Keep it Oakland feed include Black farmers, a Black beekeeper, Black florists, and a Black-owned cupcake business. The page intentionally highlights Black shop owners that would ordinarily be taken for granted or invisible within indie or DIY culture. East Bay Express, a local indie weekly, also featured Black-owned businesses, just as larger platforms like Etsy advertised Black-owned businesses in the wake of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s murders.

While the Oakland Indie Alliance the #KeepItOakland hashtag showcased Black-owned businesses before the June 2020 uprising, the posts took on a new urgency. Posts highlighted Black-owned restaurants during Oakland’s Black restaurant week and paid homage to historic Black community spaces. For instance, a Black owned bar is featured in a June 18 post on the Keep It Oakland page and depicted as a “central gathering space to celebrate black spirit.” While the post does not use the hashtag #Black Lives Matter, which might dilute vital activist channels, the post does invoke Black Lives Matter along with a Black fist and the phrases “Black Joy Matters. Black Spirit Matters.”

There are many deeply rooted radical Black activist groups in Oakland, and some crowdfunding efforts and social media campaigns brought attention to their work. Uhuru, a non-profit that sells second-hand furniture and decorative items is connected to APEDE.org and raises money for African self-determination. On Instagram, along with images of staff members, customers, and new furniture finds, Uhuru also links to Oakland grassroots organizations that support racial justice, such as People’s Breakfast. People’s Breakfast Oakland is on Instagram and Twitter, sustaining the free breakfast program and other community initiatives set up by the Black Panthers. Such groups now use platforms along with hashtags and crowdfunding campaigns to link histories of radical care to contemporary struggles.

Oakland Indie Alliance developed a separate repair fund to help small businesses, and specifically BIPOC businesses, that were damaged during the protests. Many of these businesses had already been left out of PPP loans. Through OIA posts to the Keep It Oakland page, local businesses at once tried to amplify calls for political action and social justice alongside commercial interests for already hurting businesses. This requires a balancing act, which is not always executed with elegance.

On the Oakland Indie Alliance’s website, the Keep It Oakland Repair Fund explicitly ties itself to radical politics and mutual aid: “When storefronts are damaged at political demonstrations, Oakland’s small businesses stand with the community. When visitors from all over the world tour The Town, they taste our food, touch our local goods, and dance at our local venues.” The OIA highlights the importance of local Oakland authenticity in attracting tourists, placing small businesses at the center of Oakland’s appeal and residents’ material survival. The OIA’s site also ties small businesses to racial justice efforts: “No Justice, no peace. Oakland Indie Alliance stands in solidarity with those fighting for justice and police accountability in the streets of Oakland. In some cases, our members are the ones on the street standing arm in arm with the community.” Small business owners are portrayed as activists and community organizers. Small businesses are described as fragile, already on the precipice of ruin because of the ongoing pandemic, and the repair fund is a way to “ensure the sustainability of our local small business community.” The Repair Fund privileges marginalized and under-resourced businesses; according to the website, “90% of grantees were BIPOC, Immigrant, woman, and/or queer-owned.”

The OIA site states that “[m]any of our businesses are ineligible or unable to access federal funding. Historically undercapitalized businesses – those owned by immigrants, Black and Indigenous people, people of color, women – have been severely left behind in recovery efforts.” This is why OIA sought big corporate donors along with donations from community members to sustain small businesses, offering 10,000 forgivable loans to people left out of PPP funding. For many businesses, this was the only financial support they received, and many small business owners I spoke to felt abandoned by the local, state, and federal governments.

In addition to the official Repair and Recovery funds initiated by the OIA, crowdfunding campaigns also cropped up for many local businesses, from bars and coffee shops to boutiques and music venues. Restaurants started GoFundMes for their out-of-work staff. A GoFundMe can be one tool used in the spirit of mutual aid, if it is verified by the community and established organizations that were already putting in the work. For instance, Oakland indie shops tagging Black activist groups like Anti Police-Terror Project, Moms4Housing, People’s Breakfast Oakland, and encouraging their customers to follow them and donate money is certainly a mutual aid gesture, as is donating to bail funds or community food banks.

OIA provided mutual aid to community groups, supporting protestors in the streets, at the same time it sought to protect small business interests, attempting to use racial justice as a common denominator in both aspects of their work. Much of Oakland remained boarded up at time of writing in April 2021, despite the ebb of major protests, because many shops had been closed since the start of shelter-in-place last March. Black artists later made the boarded-up buildings into colorful, powerful murals honoring the lives of Black people, including Nia Wilson, a young woman who was murdered at the MacArthur BART station. It remains to be seen what will happen to these artworks over time if businesses reopen after the pandemic, or if new ones take their place (Hotchkiss, 2020).

Oakland’s murals have become intertwined with larger calls for social justice in online spaces as well as with commercial interests. One Black woman-owned boutique in downtown Oakland shows a model wearing a comfortable outfit and mask. The caption says it is a perfect working from home look. But in the background is a mural dedicated to Breonna Taylor and other Black lives lost to police violence. Again, the images are front and center, but the hashtags tied to the post focus on the situatedness of the shop, including #KeepItOakland, #OaklandIndies, and #OaklandSmallBiz. Located on a boarded up jewelry shop on Piedmont Avenue, a wealthy, primarily white commercial district, is a colorful mural of Angela Davis, the iconic Bay Area scholar and activist (Image 3). Davis appeared at the Juneteenth port shutdown protest led by Black Oakland dock workers, and the mural stands as a testament to this historical moment.

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Image 3.

Angela Davis mural on Piedmont Avenue in Oakland, June 2020 (photo by author).

Keep it Oakland provides a window into the ways that an assemblage of PSPs, platforms, and apps, along with USPS and other logistical infrastructures, helps material goods and services reach a global audience while maintaining a strong affective connection to the local. Given the processes of gentrification and displacement in the Bay Area, which has rampant wealth and racial inequalities that are only being exacerbated by the pandemic, one might ask, whose Oakland is being kept? As researchers like Benjamin (2019), Eubanks (2018), and Noble (2018) have long argued, digital platforms can make inequalities worse and can reinforce structural racism. Digital redlining practices are an extension and continuation of historical redlining practices. Thus, platformization must be studied in local contexts in particular moments in time, tying new technologies and associated practices to situated histories and localized circumstances.