At the only traffic signal in the entire town of Driggs, Idaho, three young girls in pink helmets atop their wobbly scooters and bikes wait to cross the street. Green yields to yellow. Yellow to red. Trucks with mudflaps and cattle dogs on flatbeds and SUVs bedecked with “Baby on Board” warnings lurch to a stop. The three pink dots glide across the two-lane Main Street and head toward the Corner Drug. It’s about as close to a weekday lunch rush in August as one can get here.
Summer is peak season in Driggs. Every year, 500,000 visitors breeze through the Teton Valley on their way to float the Snake River or to watch geysers erupt in Yellowstone National Park. Some of them wander into the Corner Drug and end up buying souvenirs; huckleberry syrups and jams, potato scented lotion, Idaho “river rock” candy. More likely, they’re tempted into a root beer float, huckleberry milkshake or lime freeze — specialties served up behind the positively ancient-looking solid wood bar at the soda fountain. But for those not just wandering in for a delightful vacation stop, the Corner Drug functions as a community resource — and even a lifeline — to the town of 2,000. As it has for 119 years.
Aisles are filled with more toys than any other store in Driggs and hundreds of books — including titles by local writers. The back houses a full-service pharmacy that, up until 15 years ago, was the only one within a 50-mile radius. “When you live in a small town, you know everybody. You take care of their kids, you take care of their grandparents,” says Sally Myler, a pharmacist at the Corner Drug who has owned the store for 25 years with her husband, Aaron. “We’re an anchor at the corner. If we weren’t here, I don’t know what Main Street would be.”
Americans trust small businesses more than any other institution, including universities, churches and the military.
Last year, Pew Research Center reported that 86 percent of adults say small businesses — those with fewer than 500 employees — positively affect the country. Americans trust them more than any other institution, including universities, churches and the military. The Small Business Administration estimates they account for 99.9 percent of firms nationwide. Yet they generate less than half of the nation’s gross domestic product, and only account for 39 percent of the nation’s payroll. In the face of large corporations, small businesses are eclipsed. And they struggle. Numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that, nationwide, 20 percent of new, small businesses fail in their first year, and about 65 percent don’t make it past 10 years, with only a quarter surviving for 15 years or more.
But, as a region, the West has created a culture — and economy — that may make it easier for small businesses to thrive. States like Utah, Wyoming, Nevada and Idaho consistently rank among the most business-friendly in the country, thanks to a mix of community values and business policies. “The West is a really interesting story in that there are so many states that are hubs of innovation and economic growth and opportunity,” says Jonathan Williams, president and chief economist of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a think tank focused on promoting business and limited government.
As shoppers file into the Corner Drug on a Monday, floating around for small talk and filled prescriptions, it becomes clear how much is at stake when local institutions threaten to shutter. There’s history, identity and autonomy to consider. Sally can’t imagine her community without the Corner Drug. If it ends with her, it’s gone for good.
When her father owned the Corner Drug before her, Sally grew up washing dishes at the soda fountain. Her great-grandfather ran the business before the both of them, starting in 1920, decades before the town got electricity. There were no ice machines in his days. Instead, locals harvested ice from ponds and rivers, preserved it in sawdust, then delivered it door to door by horse-drawn wagon. Sally’s great-grandfather rode to work on horseback. He held the shop open late, until moviegoers got out of theaters or school athletes got out of games, in case anyone wanted to stop at the soda fountain. Then he rode the eight miles back home at midnight. Even in the dead of winter. “I think there’s a lot to be said about legacy and taking care of people,” Sally says. “I think what we do is important. We’re not in this to get rich. We’re in this to support ourselves … and to help people.”
All American businesses were small, often family-owned, businesses until about the 20th century. Back in 1781, Thomas Jefferson wrote in his “Notes on the State of Virginia” that a nation without farmers and small business owners “begets subservience and venality.” Americans who went into business for themselves, he felt, fostered a sense of economic independence that prevented the new country from ever again falling under imperial control. He concluded that small businesses created a citizenry with stronger moral character and contributed to a free and democratic nation. He even went so far as to call these laborers “the chosen people of God.”
I think there’s a lot to be said about legacy and taking care of people. We’re not in this to get rich. We’re in this to support ourselves and to help people.
The same ideologies pushed the pioneers westward in the 19th century in search of land and economic opportunity by way of the Homestead Act. Not without hardship and sometimes brutal violence, families bartered and traded with other settlers and Indigenous people so they could build roads, construct schools, raise cabins, harvest crops and eventually create a system of government on the frontier range.
“Everybody’s dream was to own a business,” says Naomi Lamoreaux, professor emeritus of economics and history at Yale University. “You didn’t want to work for someone; that was considered a failure in a sense.” Until the economy shifted from agrarian to industrial in the 19th century, that is. The term “big business” entered the lexicon, and the public grew concerned about monopolies and robber barons. Those concerns weren’t unfounded. America’s proud embrace of the idea of a free market economy encourages businesses to compete without much government interference, for the most part. That means large, consolidated businesses — namely national chains like Walmart or McDonald’s — can leverage their purchasing power and mass production to overpower small, local counterparts. Those high rates of early failure for small businesses are a direct consequence; they’re just not able to compete with corporations.
Suddenly, the idea that any individual or family could make a living with their own business became threatened, and the small business became the underdog of a nationwide David and Goliath story — an idea that average citizens can see themselves in and root for.
“The same way that corporations gobble up land and make it hard for wild animals to live, corporations have gobbled up the economy and made it much more difficult for small businesses to thrive,” says Cindy Kam, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University who has researched public opinion of small business. “This idea that there are identifiable human beings within a community who open up a shop, hang a shingle, interact with humans, interact with their neighbors. It is very idealized. It’s similar to myths that we have in the Wild West about the untamed wilderness and the free spirit of American enterprise.”
Except in some places, it’s not a myth at all.
A few piano chords float into the corner office at Daynes Music Company in Midvale, Utah, from the front showroom. It’s about an hour before closing on a Friday in September, so business is slow, but Kerwin Ipsen listens to the stragglers tinker with the store’s Steinways as he quietly settles into his new desk and new role.
Ipsen has worked at Daynes for 38 years, but he only recently became president of the company when Skip Daynes, the fourth-generation owner, died last year. The piano shop has been in business since 1862, making it the oldest continuously running family business in the state of Utah, and one of the oldest in the country. The founder, Joseph John Daynes, was a pioneer who, legend has it, Brigham Young enlisted to be the first organist in the Tabernacle Choir shortly after his arrival in the Salt Lake Valley. What Ipsen believes is the very pump organ Joseph John Daynes strapped to his back and carried across the plains as he made the trek to Utah sits beside his desk today. “One of the reasons we’re so successful in Utah,” he says, “Utah has always been one of the most family-oriented states in all of America. Most of these families grew up around a piano at some point in time. We come from a really music-oriented culture.”
Regardless of how prominent the music industry is in the state, the policies are what allow small businesses like Daynes to prosper for more than a century. Utah has a flat individual income tax rate of 4.5 percent, which means all taxpayers pay the same rate, while the average individual income tax nationwide is 14.5 percent. For businesses, Utah’s tax rate is also 4.5 percent, compared to the national average of 6.5 percent.
Between 1995 and 2019, small business employment in Utah grew by more than 60 percent — more than the national average. That’s why the American Legislative Exchange Council has ranked it the most business-friendly state for 18 years in a row. Nearly half of all employees in Utah work for small businesses. Here, it’s possible to carve out a space among the national chains, franchises and big boxes. “Our customers are really comfortable because of the same experience they have here. It’s comfortable. They’re willing to refer us to their family members, their friends. It comes back to us that way, too,” Ipsen says. “I’m not brave enough to change it.”
Idaho similarly has a flat individual income tax rate and business income tax rate of 5.8 percent, still well below the national average. Wyoming is widely believed to have the most business-friendly tax climate in the country because it doesn’t have any individual or business income tax. Neither does Nevada, making it a low-cost state for startups. “The current policy environment in many of the Western states is very competitive because of limited regulation, low tax rates and generally pro-business policies,” says Williams. “But it’s also this idea that they are going to remain competitive states and their elected leaders will have that philosophy of prioritizing small business and individuals in the case that we have some sort of an economic downturn.”
Ipsen didn’t even play piano when he first began working for Daynes. But, over the years, he’s developed a practice of playing — and listening — each day. He’s taken his three children out to camp near Priest Lake in Idaho. They’d look up at the stars from the roof of their camper van and listen to “The Swan” from Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Carnival of the Animals.” And he does everything he can to share that same magic with customers. That is to say, his neighbors, his family, his community.
The pressure of being the first non-Daynes to run the Daynes Music Company in 162 years is not lost on Ipsen. He runs the business exactly the same as his predecessor, down to the smallest interior design choice. He’s made zero changes to his office, which took him more than a year to even work up the courage to move into. After devoting decades of his life to a company that has prospered since the American Civil War, he wants to maintain the delicate balance that has rendered its continuing success. Especially when so much else around him is uncertain.
This year is on track to be one of the worst years for bankruptcies in about a decade. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts already reported that bankruptcies have increased by more than 13 percent in the last year, and the Chamber of Commerce found that as the current administration doubles down with tariffs on about $3 trillion worth of imports, small businesses face rising costs and closures. More than 50 percent of small businesses couldn’t afford to take out a loan with current interest rates, either. “When you talk to business owners,” Williams says, “they want predictability in the business environment and low taxes they can reasonably expect to continue in the future.”
This year will be one of the worst for bankruptcies in a decade. Along with tariffs and rising costs, small businesses are most at risk. More than 50 percent can’t afford to take out a loan with current interest rates, either.
Small businesses are the least equipped to survive the loss of revenue associated with economic uncertainty. To make matters worse, employees see that and leave small businesses behind for more stability. It’s a sort of work flight. About 53 percent of Americans now work for large companies, compared to before the Great Recession in 2007, when the majority worked for small firms.
Present economic challenges play a large part for many, but there’s also the fact that most small business owners are at or near retirement age with no succession plan. Especially in rural areas, where employers feel inflation the most and struggle to hire because of difficulties attracting potential employees to live in their communities. The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco reported in 2023 that these operations in states like Alaska, Arizona, California, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Washington report difficulties with the growing cost of goods, services and wages as well as hiring, retention and supply chain issues.
Myler doesn’t have a successor in mind for the Corner Drug. Ipsen doesn’t have a clear picture yet, either — and his own rise to the lead of the company has already broken the family line of ownership. Times do change, after all. Residents flock to lower prices, even if that means shopping at a chain store that only keeps about 13 percent of each dollar spent in the local community on average. Fewer families purchase luxury items like pianos. Lime freezes don’t sell well when the weather outside is freezing, too, come winter. Cultures change and towns sometimes morph into strange new iterations of themselves. Though it’s worth hoping that whoever lives to see those futures has the ability to carve out their own slice of it, make their American dream come true and, maybe, somehow, make it last.
This story appears in the November 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.