WORCESTER, Mass. - With the holiday shopping season in full swing, some small business owners are noticing the sales boost they typically see this time of year hasn’t come to fruition, and worry there isn’t much reason for optimism going forward.

Nicole DiCello opened Bedlam Book Cafe in 2018, and this has been one of her slowest holiday shopping seasons yet. On Wednesday, her shop’s doors were open for about an hour before anyone stepped up to the register.

In recent months, DiCello decided to pay for marketing services to help her business get some more exposure, but despite their best efforts, sales continued to decline.

“I think they had great ideas, there were great things they were doing, but I don’t think you can combat an economy that’s quite like what’s going on right now,” DiCello said.

Crompton Place, the Canal District building in which DiCello’s shop is located, is one of many examples of Worcester’s knack for breathing new life into the boarded-up past. In the last decade, the long-vacant industrial building opened its doors for a book store, an antique shop, a boutique and a restaurant.

These days, however, some of those small business owners like DiCello are wondering if their future won’t be unlike the long gone industrial operation which came before them.

“There has been a lack of people around, and even the people that are here are just browsers,” DiCello said. “They're not buying. I sell one book at a time. I think after the season, we're going to see a lot of businesses close. And I'm really scared about that, because Worcester has just been getting this revitalization going, and there's amazing things here.”

Those fears are part of the reason Dani Babineau, co-founder of Redemption Rock Brewing, recently gathered a large group of local small business owners for a wide-ranging conversation on the challenges they’ve faced since the COVID-19 pandemic.

She said it was helpful for people to feel they’re not alone, but it also showed how daunting the challenges they face really are.

“Improving your product or improving your marketing, those are solvable problems,” Babineau said. “But when we're looking at these larger economic forces that are affecting all of these businesses, it's something that is a lot scarier and it's something that also takes putting our heads together and having these larger conversations in order to overcome them.”

In a post-pandemic world, solutions for struggling small businesses aren’t so easy, but longstanding issues like parking and people having less expendable income often came up during conversations with local retailers.

“It’s been really difficult even going to the grocery store and getting food, so it might feel like a big ask for the community to come out and spend more money for Christmas,” said Katie Cutler, a sales associate at Crompton Collective.

Babineau views her conversation with fellow business owners as the first step on a path to meaningful change, because talking about these struggles publicly could help raise awareness.

She wants to be vocal, because she doesn’t want to see a Worcester stripped of the character these small businesses provide. When her friends who live outside the city talk about its improved image in recent years, she points to its small business owners as the driving force behind it.

“That is to the credit of small business owners who decided that there was something of value here, and who decided to open here and to invest their time, their energy, their money, and frankly, burn themselves out trying to make the city better,” Babineau said. “And they’re really struggling right now.”