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| Ratner is second from the left. (AP photo by Mandel Ngan) |
We reported last week about how President Trump's popularity is slipping in rural America; this story illustrates the trend by showing what happened to a rural Massachusetts pet store owner when he posed for a photo op with the president.
Dave Ratner has owned Dave's Soda and Pet City for 42 years, a small chain of shops with locations around small-town New England (including Stafford Springs, Conn., and Mass. towns Agawam, Ware, Northampton, Ludlow, and Hadley.) "Ratner attended President Trump’s signing Thursday of an executive order authorizing changes to the Affordable Care Act designed to create cheaper — and less comprehensive — health insurance plans. An Associated Press photograph of the event, with Ratner smiling broadly behind Trump, has come back to haunt him," Laurie Loisel reports for The Boston Globe.
Since the photo appeared, Ratner has been criticized on social media, his shops have been inundated with angry callers, long-time customers have sworn off shopping at his stores, and some are even circulating petitions calling for boycotts. Ratner told the Globe it was the "worst two days of my life."
The blowback may seem surprising since New England tends to be liberal, but rural areas such as western Massachusetts are more conservative.
Ratner--who says he is not a Trump supporter--said the whole thing came about because he's an active member of the National Retail Federation, a trade association that supports small businesses. "For years through this federation, his company and others negotiated for cheaper group insurance rates, giving them some of the advantages large companies have. With the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act, this negotiating power vanished. Since then, he has trekked to Washington, D.C., annually, talking to anyone who will listen about how unfair that is," Loisel reports.
Two weeks ago, the NRF called Ratner and invited him to a ceremony where, they said, Trump would sign an order restoring that negotiating power back to small businesses. Ratner says he was happy to hear it, but didn't realize exactly what the signing meant for the ACA, and didn't dig further into it.
"I absolutely abhor what he did, and I would not have been there had I known what was happening," Ratner told Loisel. Ratner has hired a Boston PR firm to help him rebuild his company's image. "It was 42 years of building a wonderful brand and having it destroyed in one day," he said.
from The Rural Blog http://ift.tt/2ijcYM0 Rural Mass. business owner under fire after posing for photo with Trump - Entrepreneur Generations
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