Some small businesses caught in culture wars face financial woes, employee fears: 'Never been as bad'
Sales slumps at Target and Bud Light draw attention but backlash also hurts small companies. When Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott declared a war on "woke" earlier this year with a proposal that would require booksellers to rate texts before selling them to school districts, he caught the attention of a small wholesaler in St. Louis who feared that his industry would be decimated. "We're not book raters -- we're booksellers," said Benjamin Conn, the owner of Classroom Library Company and the president of the Education al Book and Media Association, a group of 150 distributors nationwide that sell books to schools. "It would be like if Paramount came out with a movie and every theater had to rate it themselves." The trade association hired a lobbyist, who negotiated with Texas officials on behalf of an alternative version of the measure, Conn told ABC News, but to no avail. In response to a lawsuit brought by booksellers, a federal judge last mont...