I was shopping at my local fishmonger the other day and my jaw dropped when I saw the price of Rockfish went up nearly $2 a pound.

I didn't say anything but one of the owners caught my shocked facial expression and rushed over to say two words: "gas prices."

We both shook our heads in quiet understanding. But I still went on to protest a bit about the size of the jump in fish prices.

It was easy for me to see the prices for all the items at the fish shop. There are only about 20 to 25 products sold at the small bare-bones store, and prices are written on a blackboard.

I realized at that moment I was being a bit unfair. When I walk into a giant supermarket or department store it's harder to figure out right away whether price tags have been jacked up. And there's probably no one in power to complain to even if I did notice.

Small businesses have the worst of both worlds. They typically have the tightest margins so escalating fuel prices hit them hard, and they get harassed when they raise their prices even a little bit because it's so easy to notice.

And many are definitely raising prices, even in this tough economy. They have to.

According to the National Federation of Independent Business, the net percent of small business owners "reporting higher average selling prices rose five points to a net 13 percent in February" from the previous month.
 
But how do small business owner raise prices without making their customers freak?

Reed Holden and Mark Burton, coauthors of "Pricing with Confidence: 10 Ways to Stop Leaving Money on the Table," offer this advice:
 
"When it comes to raising prices, small businesses need to bundle services and products to create different levels of offerings. That way, customers will have the choice of: the least expensive product -- which does not come with a lot of additional services and features; a mid-priced offering -- which has value-added services and benefits; and a high-priced offering, which is the most desirable and the one many mid-level customers eventually upgrade to. By creating price differentials based on value, salespeople will be able to enter into customer negotiations with confidence.

And Elizabeth Gordon, author of "The Chic Entrepreneur: Put Your Business in Higher Heels," says you can be a stealthy price raiser.

"The way to do this is to offer more value," she explains. "For instance if you are offering service A right now, add on service AA by adding some additional value and then cut back slightly on you were originally providing for the price of A.  That way you separate your price sensitive buyers from those who are not, and provide each with what they want.  This makes price increases a lot more palatable to buyers, because you are not just raising prices with nothing to show for it; you are providing them with the option to get more value."

And giving customer advanced notice also helps.

 "Let your customers know through some means of formal communication, preferably a personal letter from the owner on company letterhead," she says. "Let them know two to three months before the price increase takes effect so they can plan for it.  A price increase looming three months out in the future is a lot less agitating than one that is sprung upon someone right out of the blue."

I suppose the price hike on my Rockfish would have been less painful if I had some notice. And it definitely would have been more palatable if they threw in some shrimp.

I'm feeling pretty lonely.

Lately I've noticed my e-mails are going unanswered for longer and longer periods of time.

I check my e-mail every few seconds, and I can't imagine not getting back to people in a flash.

But maybe I've bought into this crazy way of life.

Maybe I should take a page from the owner of a tea lounge in San Francisco who has taken a machete to e-mail.

I wrote a story last  week about how some people feel overloaded thanks to our high-tech, 24-7 information society, and it seems there's also a growing backlash against the info overload among entrepreneurs.

Last week, I received an e-mail from Jesse Jacobs, owner of the Samovar Tea Lounge, and when I replied this was the automatic response I got back:

"In an effort to focus on the tea business more, and e-mail less, I will be responding to e-mail on Monday and Thursday at 1pm. If you need an immediate response please don't hesitate to call me."

Call? Is this guy serious? Who has time for that?

OK, 1 p.m. came and went but no e-mail. I was sort of angry until I realized he was on West Coast time. I'd have to wait until 4 p.m. EST to get my answer and that would throw a wrench in my work.

Reluctantly, I went old school and called the guy.

"What's up with this e-mail bashing?" I asked.

"It's an inefficient tool," he says. "When you're e-mailing back and forth it's easy to feel like your doing a lot but at the end of the day it doesn't help you accomplish your goals."

The way he sees it, e-mail was actually hampering his creativity and is keeping him from growing his business, which now includes two locations, 50 employees, and an e-commerce site. He has plans to grow his online offerings and open stores in other cities, but the "constant bombardment of e-mail" was robbing him of precious time. "I have no budget to hire a personal assistant."

So, his New Years resolution was to cut back on his e-mail "affliction" as he calls it.

"I'm stepping out of this cultural vortex of the faster you respond the faster you get a response,'" he explains.

About this time I was wondering if I had an affliction, so I questioned him more, like an alcoholic who suddenly wonders if she's drinking too much.

"What have been the negatives?" I asked, sure he'd tell me some horror story about pissing off a customer.

"Nothing," he says. "Nothing," I retort. "Nothing," he adds.

"I'm not a Luddite," says Jacobs, who used to work in high tech. "We use technology everywhere we can. I even just started a blog."

His mission was simply to pull the plug on the e-mail avalanche that was keeping him from focusing on what's important, growing his business.

I'm not sure he can distance himself too much from the Luddites. Turns out he recently bought a 1956 Underwood typewriter and has been forcing his staff to take meeting notes on the dinosaur.

Instead of having a big volume of meeting notes because everyone was typing away on their laptops, they now share that one typewriter and end up with four or five key points.

What's next, carbon copies?

I live right outside of downtown Wilmington in a suburb that's overloaded with retail stores because Delaware is the land of tax-free shopping, so folks on the Pennsylvania border flock here.

When I need to buy a book fast, this is what I do.

I drive down the main suburban retail drag and go to Borders. When they don't have what I want – which is typical because none of these big box stores stock variety anymore – I go to the Barnes & Noble a few blocks down and check for the book. When that turns up nothing, I head to my favorite bookstore, the Ninth Street Book Shop, which is right downtown but is the farthest away.

It's an independent store, and it tends to have a more eclectic mix of books.

Well, when I heard Borders was putting itself up for sale and that Barnes & Noble is considering buying its competitor, I immediately thought this would be good news for Jack and Gemma Buckley, who own the Ninth Street Book Shop.

I was wrong.

I got Jack on the phone and asked him if he had read about the Borders sale. He said he had but didn't think the sale, or a merger between the two book giants, would really impact his business.

Turns out the Buckleys' bookshop, which has been in the city of Wilmington for 31 years, is at a precarious point in its history.

"Business is awful," he says. While he acknowledges that the big book retailers put pressure on small shops and even ran some out of business, his business is suffering now because of the lack of customers in downtown Wilmington.

He calls the city a "retail wasteland."

Twelve years ago, he explains, business began to fall off and it's gotten worse and worse ever since. At the height of the store's success more than a decade ago, they had six full-time workers. Today they only have one.

It's not that the city is lacking corporate tenants. It's just that the employees don't like to venture outside of their company cocoon.

"Even when companies relocate to the city, they bring the mentality with them that they had at their office parks. They don't leave the building and venture outside," he says. "We used to have a big business clientele, but no more."

And he shared some awful news with me. That when his lease is up in a year and a half, if things don't change, he'll be closing up shop for good.

At age 60, he says, he's too old to go into debt to relocate the store, so it may be goodbye Ninth Street Book Shop.

Suddenly I'm overwhelmed with the thought that we all should have done more. Why didn't I just head over to Ninth Street to pick up the books I needed instead of first driving to a huge parking lot and walking into a huge chain?

I got a call last week from a source at the national Better Business Bureau and she wanted to get the word out about how some small firms are getting scammed by Internet loan companies.

With banks tightening credit, small business owners are scrambling to find other sources for loans to build their business or just to keep their heads above water.

The Internet, as usual, is where a lot of you have turned.

Even the Wall Street Journal did a story last week on how entrepreneurs are turning to online networks to get loans. I don't blame you all. You have to find other sources, and it makes sense to turn to the Web.

But that doesn't mean you throw all your common sense out of the window and turn into a cyber-space cadet.

This is how the scam works, according to the BBB's Alison Preszler:

Companies offer loans no matter what a small business owner's credit rating is at supposedly great rates, but then the scammer asks for an upfront fee to secure the loan and never actually pays out the loan.

Ding, ding, ding. Warning bell. You shouldn't pay out money to borrow money.

"There's been an increase in this kind of scam since October nationwide," Preszler says, and she surmises it's because of the credit crunch.

A lot of complaints, she says, are coming out of Connecticut so I called the Connecticut BBB and found out from them that one firm in particular has had some issues.

The company goes under the name Mediations LLC and has a Web site called www.mediationsonline.net. Christen Horan, vice president of marketplace operations for the Connecticut BBB, says typically the complaints they see are consumers who get scammed by fly-by-night advance-fee-loan firms but it's unusual to see this go business-to-business.

She directed me to Mediation's online BBB report:

"BBB has received complaints from businesses across the country stating that Mediations, LLC (also doing business as Innovations Northeast, LLC) is charging substanital up-front fees for construction loans, but not delivering on the loans.

Complaint information indicates that the up-front fees range from $1,500 to as high as $26,000, and are required to be paid by wire transfer or by cashiers check."

Michael Petriccione, president of Mediations based in Hartford, Conn., says the fees are for appraisals and "interest reserves," and are legitimate.  "This office is as squeaky clean as you get," he said.

Bottom line, small business owners have to do their homework, get recommendations, and make sure they're working with reputable loan companies.

And don't pay upfront fees, other than nominal processing fees that some conventional lenders may charge, in the $125 to $150 range, says Mike Stamler, a spokesman for the U.S. Small Business Administration.

Somethings that's described "as a contingency fee, or a fee to reserve a larger amount of money or a substantial amount of earnest money [committment funds ahead of a down payment] bears the odor of scam," he explains.

And, he adds, "a small business should be very suspicious about any supposed lender that asks you to wire money or a cashier's check to secure a bigger loan.  Legitimate commercial lenders just don't work that way.  It's frankly not that different from what people used to call a pigeon drop scheme, where someone used to pretend to find a large sum of money in, say, a paper bag, and offer to split it with you if you provide some 'earnest money.'  For that matter, it's pretty similar to the so-called Nigerian e-mail schemes, where someone offers to share a fortune with you if you provide money first."

"It sounds silly," he adds, "but people do fall for this stuff."

This letter is to inform you that if you don't do something about the healthcare crisis in this country you might as well be pointing a loaded pistol at the head of small business owners everywhere.

This is my letter to Barack, Hillary and John. It may sounds a bit melodramatic, but it's not to most entrepreneurs.

What if you could send a letter to the person that may end up running the country one day and urge them to help small business owners deal with the growing healthcare crisis?

Would it help?

That's the tactic a small business advocacy group tried this week and I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Saul Loeb / AFP - Getty Images

The letter that the National Federation of Independent Business sent to candidates is a bit different than the one I crafted in the beginning of this blog.

Here's the NFIB's approach in the three letters the federation sent to Sens. and presidential candidates Clinton, McCain and Obama:

"The cost of healthcare has reached unmanageable proportions for America's job creators, threatening the future success and productivity of small businesses across the country. These businesses are the backbone of the U.S. economy and are disproportionately struggling with healthcare costs because they do not have the coverage options or the same purchasing power of large employers or corporations. On average, small businesses pay 18 percent more for the same healthcare benefits."

The letters are part of a new campaign launched this week by NFIB and called "Solutions Start Here". The group describes this initiative as "an aggressive healthcare campaign that will urge policymakers to deliver real and meaningful healthcare reform for small business."

Some of the campaign's planned activities:
•    Hosting Fix-it Forums in seven cities across the country to listen to and learn from the real-life healthcare stories and struggles of small business owners and employees;
•    Inviting NFIB members, presidential candidates and legislators to sign a petition that reinforces the need to drive down healthcare costs while maintaining quality and choice. The petition will be submitted to the 111th Congress and the incoming Administration;
•    Moderating a series of healthcare reform forums that bring health policy leaders and economists together to discuss and debate the most crucial elements of healthcare reform; and
•    Conducting two high-level research projects to better understand how small business responds to different policy suggestions so that we can determine what small business owners specifically want in various legislative proposals.

So what are they asking specifically from the three recipients in the letters they received via courier to their campaign headquarters?

"In the coming months you'll be hearing more about 'Solutions Start Here' as we go on a tour hosting 'Fix it Forums' with small business owners across the country to learn more about their specific needs and proposed solutions. They will be signing a petition that reinforces the need for action to drive down healthcare costs while maintaining quality and choice, and encourages policymakers to consider those needs when discussing reform. I urge you to join them by signing the enclosed petition that demonstrates your commitment to real solutions for America's small businesses and their employees."

I'll keep you all posted as to who signs and when.

I was one of those teenagers who had really bad acne growing up, and I tried everything to clear my skin up.

I even swore off chocolate and Kalamata olives for 2 years but it really didn't make much of a difference.

When I hit my twenties a friend of mine treated me to a facial for my birthday and I was in shock how much it helped my skin problem. I vowed to get lots of facials so I to could become one of the lucky clear-skinned humans. That is until I found out how much my really nice friend ponyed up for the facial.

It was nearly $100 for a half-hour treatment at some fancy schmancy Manhattan salon. Being a poor journalist at the time, I figured it would be the last time I'd make it to a facial spa.

But what if there were drop-in facial shops that offered cut rates on facials? (Look at all the cheap manicures you can get on almost every street corner today.)

Ivan Hunter / Getty Images

Sherryl Ford, the founder and CEO of Facelogic, did just that and now runs a franchise operation of spas that only offer facials, and do it for under $50 for a 50 minute treatment.

It came to her one night.

In 2005, she owned a day spa and two Curves fitness franchises and realized lots of her spa customers were not coming on a regular basis for facials even though they loved them because they just couldn't afford the luxury.

She was charging between $70 and $125 at the time for a facial. So one night, around 2 a.m., she woke up and wrote her idea for inexpensive facials on a four-by-six inch piece of paper.

"It was a missed market in the beauty industry," Ford says.

She approached Gary Findley, the retired president of Curves, who lived in Waco, with her idea, and he loved it and signed on to handle the sales for the new firm.

The first Facelogic opened in May 2005 in Waco.

She, along with two partners, now have 40 franchise locations with 60 additional under development across the country, although now there are mostly concentrated in California and Texas.

Her first store on the East Coast opened this month in Morristown, N.J.

When she started out she figured she'd hire estheticians right out of school to keep her costs down, but it turned out there's such a glut of people who specialize in facials out there the shops typically hire individuals with two to five years of experience.

Sales for 2007 hit $2.4 million and she projects to bring in nearly $4.5 million this year, and have 1000 locations by 2014.

Quite a feat for one of those supreme beings who never had an acne problem.

When someone doesn't pay you what you're owed for the products you make or the service you provide don't threaten them with bodily harm.

I love that piece of advice from the National Federation of Independent Business.

I know deadbeats can make you want to hit someone, but cooler heads must prevail or you could end up in jail. It's harder to collect when you're in the slammer.

Everlast

One small business owner Jay Goldberg, owner of Bergino, a company that makes handmade gift baseballs handled his deadbeat perfectly, even though he still hasn't gotten his money.

A large catalog company based in Missouri since last year has owed him money.

"The irony of this whole thing is when I sell to a little retail shop I have them pay me upfront, but for larger accounts they always get terms," he says, rethinking his strategy now.

They're supposed to pay him within 30 days and if they don't, Goldberg's typically pretty lenient and gives them another 30 days. After that he starts to follow-up.

He started making calls to the deadbeat company and "right away I got a bad vibe. I made call after call, and then I spoke to a person in charge of accounting. She told me 'you'll get your money. Don't worry.'"

At that point it was 80 days from the time he had delivered his products, and the person in accounting promised him he'd get a check in the next few weeks.

And surprise surprise, the check never came.

Finally, he got in touch with the president of the company who was very nice on the phone, and informed him that the company had been going through some problems. The president told Goldberg he could not pay the whole amount owed because the firm did not have the money.

Goldberg made a deal with the president that included accepting 50 percent of what was owned but he'd have to be paid within 10 days.

Well, weeks went by and, nothing.

The amount he's owed is $2000. That might not sound like a lot on the surface, but for a small company that's a big deal.

But the total isn't enough to justify Goldberg flying to Missouri to sue the deadbeat firm in small claims court.

So, he contacted the Attorney General's office in Missouri last month and filed a claim.

I called over to the state's AG's office and the press secretary there, John Fougere, told me the staff there makes an effort to contact the party that is the target of the complaint. And then they attempt to mediate the issue.

Last year, he says, the office returned $9.3 million to consumers and small businesses through informal mediation, without going to court.

Fougere says the AG's office tries to get to each complaint as soon as possible, often within a few weeks.

"We encourage consumers or small businesses in the state or anywhere in the U.S. if they have an issue with a business or other entity based here to contact our office," he stresses.

Not getting money you're owed is a big problem for small firms. According to the NFIB 65.7 percent of companies report cash flow was a continuing problem, and of those nearly 30 percent say that "difficulty collecting money owned you" was the main reason.

When dealing with a leech advises Steve Strauss, author of "The Small Business Bible",  "If the relationship is already fractured then a small claims case may make sense. It will certainly get their attention. Before that, after playing nice and asking repeatedly and pleasantly to be paid, I might get a lawyer to write a letter. It is business-like and professional, but it will also serve notice that the matter needs attention."

And some more don'ts from NFIB:

* Calling or communicating with the debtor so frequently that it could be considered harassment.
* Using obscene or abusive language.
* Communicating with the debtor's employer or family members.

Goldberg hasn't engaged in any of the no nos, but that doesn't mean he's not angry. "I'll keep going. I'm not done with this guy," he adds.

Let's say someone asked you to pick the top ten government rules and regulations that get under your skin as a small business owner?

That's exactly what the U.S. Small Business Administration did.

Last year, the agency solicited comments from the small business community on the rules that cost businesses big bucks, about $1.1 trillion, and last week the dreaded list was released to the press. Now, the hope is, government will get into gear and reform these rules.

Only thing is, the federal agency's notable initiative may be too little too late.

Hello, did anybody tell these guys President Bush has less than a year left in office?

What happens now is the Bush Cabinet will all get the list and they are all encouraged to act on what ever reform they can.

Thomas M. Sullivan, Chief Counsel for Advocacy for the SBA, says he's going to release an update in six months outlining which Cabinet heads did what and then release another list six months later with yet another update on what the Secretaries did or didn't do.

But if you do the math, those Secretaries will be out of their comfy government offices by then. So that means the next president's appointees will have to pick up the ball.

That is, if they want to.

Who's going to be breathing down their necks?

Not Sullivan. He's expected to be out when the Bush administration comes to an end.

To Sullivan's credit he says, we have to take a "pragmatic" approach to this type of reform. "In order to do this it will take a couple of years. This initiative can't just be, 'this is Tom Sullivan's last fanfare' because I leave when the president leaves."

"These reforms," he adds, "will be done by public servants who will not leave when the President leaves."

But there is no government mandate that the new administration will have to make these particular reform changes. Not that they won't.

I mean, it's a good list, full of stuff that will make small business owners lives easier. But it probably would have had more teeth if Tom were able to stick around and make sure the changes happen.

Well, we can hope.

Here's a run down of the top ten list. For details on each one click here.

1. Update Air Monitoring Rules for Dry Cleaners to Reflect Current Technology
2. Flexibility for Community Drinking Water Systems
3. Simplify the Rules for Recycling Solid Waste
4. EPA Should Clearly Define "Oil" in its Oil Spill Rules
5. Update Flight Rules for the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Area
6. Eliminate Duplicative Financial Requirements for Architect-Engineering Services Firms in Government Contracting
7. Simplify the Home Office Business Deduction
8. Update MSHA Rules on the Use of Explosives in Mines to Reflect Modern Industry Standards
9. Update OSHA's Medical / Laboratory Worker Rule
10. Update Reverse Auction Techniques for Online Procurement of Commercial Items

What would you have added?