The small business owner (SBO) is one of the most cherished figures in U.S. politics, sitting atop a longstanding, inequitable, and cruel hierarchy of deservingness that animates U.S. economic ideology and policy. To explore how common ideas regarding the value and function of SBOs are shaped and circulated through popular culture, this article examines Hallmark’s 2022 slate of Holiday films as a high-profile and popular site of the figure’s recurrence. Through an analysis of the year’s forty films, I argue that the SBO resolves a key tension of neoliberalism by embodying an economic fantasy whereby the small business establishes and sustains one’s self, one’s family, and one’s community. It is through their business that the SBO both realizes neoliberalism’s promises of freewheeling individualism (agency, autonomy, self-actualization) and remedies an aching nostalgia for larger collectivities of care and obligation amid neoliberalism’s cultivation of austerity, isolation, and rabid self-interest.
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