Morning Mix: The Lessons of Small Town Business, BP Tries New Cap, Lending Collapses

TOMS Shoes

After 20 years of success, a popular gastropub located in the small town of Kingsville, Ont. was struggling. So they implemented six easy, community-building marketing tactics and turned to business around

FORTUNE -- Some people turn to a mentor or maybe even a boss for management insights. Others look to Peter Drucker's books for pearls of business wisdom. Atlanta-area attorney A. Wayne Gill counts on the wisdom of his grandmother. Gill runs a law firm outside Miami; he's bought and sold a few businesses and he is the author of Tales My Grandmother Told Me: A Business Diversity Fable. Despite his considerable business experience, he often recalls lessons he learned while at his grandparents' general store in Jamaica, which he visited in the summers as a child.

A much-talked about article about Apple’s role in globalization recently appeared in the New York Times (see How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work). It addresses topics of great interest to many Americans as it attempts to explain why companies, like Apple, seem to be increasingly manufacturing products and therefore, employing workers overseas.

For your Labor Day reading enjoyment, we bring you this guest post by Lawrence B. Glickman, who teaches history at the University of South Carolina and is the author of Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America.

Mark Sunshine submits: It’s tough to explain why the Small Business Administration favors banks over non-banks in its flagship SBA 7(a) loan program. For the last 28 years, the SBA has refused to license a single new non-bank lender and has restricted the ability of existing non-bank 7(a) lenders to finance their portfolios.

Kevin Grewal submits: A sustainable economic recovery is likely to not be intact until financial institutions start lending and the credit markets loosen up, at which time small-cap ETFs, like the iShares Russell 2000 (IYW), the PowerShares Dynamic Small Cap (PJM), the Vanguard Small-Cap ETF (