When the founders of CLT Black Owned learned of the impending closure of The People’s Market, a Black-owned cafe and cocktail bar, its members quickly mobilized.
Since its founding in 2020, CLT Black Owned had worked with more than 200 Black-owned businesses in the Charlotte area, connecting them to potential customers through local events, pop-up markets and Black trivia nights.
It describes itself as a “social good company,” founded by a group of millennial friends — all Charlotte natives — on a mission to “support and stabilize” the city’s Black-owned businesses, creatives, service-providers and professionals. (QCity Metro works with CLT Black Owned to co-host events, and one of its founders, Madeline-Holly Carothers, is a member of the QCity Metro staff.)
So when word got out that The People’s Market was facing closure, CLT Black Owned launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise $30,000 in support of the financially struggling business.
Within an hour, they’d raised $7,000.
Within a day, the total had increased to $17,000.
Donations to the cause eventually topped $26,500 — just $3,500 shy of the organization’s goal.
“To see the turnaround in 24 hours was amazing, and that’s why we felt driven … to update the community, to keep pushing forward, to save the business,” Ashley Creft, a CLT Black Owned co-founder, told QCity Metro.
In a perfect world, this story would reach a happy conclusion — a business saved — but happy endings can be elusive for far too many Black-owned businesses, which fail at a rate 20% higher than their white-owned counterparts, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Cory Duran, who founded and owned The People’s Market, said that while he appreciated the gesture, $30,000 was not enough to save his business, which officially closed on Nov. 13.
In an Instagram post, Duran cited several reasons for the closure, including the financial stresses of running two stores to their “full potential” in the “current environment.
He also noted other factors: broken equipment, HVAC repairs, an electrical fire, the rising cost of labor and, finally, the 43-day government shutdown, which Duran said delayed an opportunity to get “much-needed capital” from the Small Business Administration.
“The sum of all these parts just made it too much for me to handle alone, he said in the social post. “It hurts me to my core to be forced to make this difficult decision as I tried everything to make it work.”
Scratching an itch
In a 2023 interview with QCity Metro, Duran said he had long had “the itch for entrepreneurship.”
He opened his first People’s Market in Dilworth, at the corner of East Boulevard and Scott Avenue, in November 2017, but closed in 2020 due to financial strains.
In August 2022, he reopened the concept at 1609 Elizabeth Avenue in Charlotte’s first streetcar neighborhood, along the trolley tracks. A second location, in Myers Park, was opened last June.
“I tried to hold on as long as I could,” Duran said, noting the company’s financial issues, which began, he said, six to eight months ago.
He also noted the personal strain: “It was just a lot. Being the owner, operator and just kind of putting all the burden on my shoulders, it wore me out.”
