Recognizing Enoughness; Staying Small as a Values Driven Business

"To name the world as a gift is to feel your membership in the web of reciprocity. It makes you happy-and it makes you accountable. Conceiving of something as a gift changes your relationship to it in a profound way, even though the physical makeup of the 'thing' has not changed." 

Robin Wall Kimmerer; The Serviveberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. 

Last week, we had the first meeting of The Hope Summit Bookclub here at Wake Refill. To kick it off, we started with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s essay The Serviveberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. The text explores the idea of gift economies in contrast to standard capitalism and our perception of the world’s abundance as “natural resources” to be commodified, in contrast to gifts to be received with gratitude. 

Two recurring themes deeply resonated with me, especially in the context of our tiny business: recognizing “enoughness” and the tension between acknowledging the faults of our current economic model while still having to participate in it to survive.

Wake Refill is a for-profit business operating with a mission to do good. Specifically, our mission is to promote the mutual flourishing of all people and the planet through innovative, compassionate, and waste-free thinking. We view ourselves as not only a physical resource for waste-free living, but an educational one.  Our desire at Wake Refill is to help our community reconsider our connection to material goods and contemplate the results of resource extraction on our neighbors (both human and not). We strive to be a catalyst for a community that values respect and honor for the people we share the earth with and the gifts that it gives us. 

All this to be said, we wrestle with the constant state of tension of knowing that we operate within a system that is inherently exploitative. There is no clean opt-out. Rent is due. Suppliers need to be paid. Employees deserve a living wage. And perhaps most uncomfortably, survival itself is tethered to participation in an economy where essentials for life—water, food, healthcare, shelter—are privatized and unevenly accessible. Existing within this system is not a philosophical exercise; it is a daily negotiation.

This reality sharpens the discomfort Kimmerer names. When the things required to live are treated as commodities rather than shared responsibilities, opting out is a luxury few can afford. Small businesses are not exempt from this pressure. We charge for goods that support basic need. We rely on infrastructure that extracts. We operate within markets that reward growth over care. Acknowledging this doesn’t absolve us, but it does ground the work in honesty rather than idealism or greenwashing.

It is precisely in this honesty that the idea of “enoughness” becomes radical. In an economic system built on artificial scarcity and infinite growth, enough is framed as insufficiency. More locations, more revenue, more efficiency, more optimization. Enoughness disrupts this logic. It asks: What is sufficient for people to live with dignity? What is sufficient for a business to sustain itself without extracting more than it gives back?

To be honest, our one-year-old business is still too small to meet the basic needs of our family and our team with longevity. We have watched with dismay as our two closest refill store neighbors have closed already this year (in Greenville and Savannah). The living wage in Charleston is currently $26.04, we are striving desperately to be able to meet this for ourselves and our employees, but we trust in the abundance of our community that these sacrifices will flow back to us. That we will be able to continue to provide this service with confidence and security. We need to grow, but with “enough” in mind; infinite scalability will never be the goal. So no, you won’t be seeing us on Shark Tank.

For a small business like Wake Refill, enoughness looks like choosing sustainability over speed, relationships over reach, and care over convenience. It looks like resisting the pressure to scale endlessly when being rooted and responsible is the point. It looks like acknowledging that profit is necessary but not supreme.

Small businesses are uniquely positioned to practice this ethic because they are relational by design. We know our customers’ names. We hear about rising grocery bills, medical debt, housing stress, and the quiet fatigue of trying to make ethical choices in a system that makes them expensive. These realities walk through our doors every day and we live them ourselves, side-by-side with our community. Information, trust, and responsibility flow both ways.

In this way, small businesses can begin to resemble gift economies—not because money disappears, but because value is expanded to include impact and relationship. When education and connection are offered freely, and choices are explained rather than obscured, the gift is agency in a system that often withholds it.

This does not mean small businesses are inherently ethical, nor does it mean we are immune from harm, but proximity does create accountability. When impact is visible, when the cost of extraction, the weight of pricing decisions, and the realities of access are close at hand, it becomes harder to look away. Scale can hide consequences; enoughness reveals them.

My belief is that supporting small businesses is not merely a lifestyle preference; it is an economic and ethical choice. It keeps wealth circulating locally, prioritizes relationships over algorithms, and affirms that dignity should not be gated behind scale or profit margins. So yes, "buy nothing," but we must support those who are creating what we want to see more of: artists, authors, and community do-gooders, lest they get crushed by the ever-growing, more-of-the-same exploitive giants. We do not claim that Wake Refill has resolved the contradictions of capitalism. We haven’t. But we believe small, values-driven businesses can act as living experiments: imperfect, evolving attempts at an economy that centers people, planet, and "enoughness". Thank you always for making waves with us and investing in the idea that a better way is possible. 

With abounding gratitude,

Hannah Jane