According to Wikipedia:
“The first products of Dow Jones & Company, the publisher of the Journal, were brief news bulletins, nicknamed flimsies, hand-delivered throughout the day to traders at the stock exchange in the early 1880s. They were later aggregated in a printed daily summary called the Customers’ Afternoon Letter. Reporters Charles Dow, Edward Jones, and Charles Bergstresser converted this into The Wall Street Journal, which was published for the first time on July 8, 1889, and began delivery of the Dow Jones & Company News Service via telegraph.
In 1896, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was launched. It was the first of several indices of stock and bond prices on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1899, the Journal’s Review & Outlook column, which still runs today, appeared for the first time, initially written by Charles Dow.”
The WSJ’s target readership comprised investors, business owners, and stockbrokers. Or to paraphrase today’s liberal politicians in Canada, the target market included the ‘upper middle class and those trying hard to join them’.
It’s human nature to try and live vicariously through and read about the rich and famous, whose lives seem ever so much more interesting than our own. But even in 1889, the companies trading on the New York Stock Exchange and the robber barons who controlled them were a very rare breed.
In 2023 our newspapers are filled with stories about Facebook, Google and TikTok. But the average business in the US is very small.
Today there are 3,671 companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq taken together. This is a tiny fraction of the 6.1 million businesses in the United States.
And, in Canada our businesses are even smaller.
In 2023 the population of the US was 9.66 times as large as Canada’s. But we had more than a quarter as many self-employed Canadians per capita. In fact, we have more businesses of every size except the largest (500 or more employees).
If like some people you call business owners ‘entrepreneurs’, Canadians could be considered a lot more ‘entrepreneurial’ than their American neighbours. At SBA Canada we consider entrepreneurs to be a special type of business owner. For whatever reason, there are more business owners per capita in Canada than in the ‘land of the free’ to the south of us.
The MAIN STREET JOURNAL was launched to discuss the many and varied needs of Canada’s small businesses.
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