Somehow or other in the Lefty fundamentalist mind small neighborhood businesses are good and big national and international businesses are bad. I cannot defend or understand this absurdity but I can point out the logical failure.
In nature there are a multitude of small species for the very few large species. There are billions of blades of grass, there are millions of bushes and their only tens of thousands of tall trees. The same with business.
Businesses grow for two reasons: first, because consumers like their product and second, because growth offers economies of scale. Economies of scale can occur in marketing, innovation, production, and distribution. Economies of scale reduce costs, the driving force of industrial commerce.
Because the world is made in such a way that when building 1000, each widget can be cheaper than each widget when building five, we will always have big companies.
The biggest problem that seems to be the source of Lefty antagonism, other than the fact that they are antagonistic to anything big as long as it is not a whale or an elephant, is that big business seems to destroy small business.
This is completely untrue and the result of biased observation.
First, when a new innovative enterprise enters a new field it rapidly expands the number of small businesses in that field that are able to thrive. In this earlier blog I show that the arrival of Starbucks in San Francisco in the 1990s dramatically increased the number and quality of independent coffee shop's.
Second, I have worked with dozens of small businesses that were faced with new entrants in their market; bookstores faced with national chains, retailers faced with Walmart and organic foods (and even bagel shops) faced with new chains. And every retailer faced with the Internet.
In each and every case I was able to recommend changes in the business operation that made the local store more valuable and more desirable to its customers. In a few instances I saw success where the local store made the adaptations I recommended. In almost every other case I found that the local store owners did not have the energy to make the necessary changes. Old-age, boredom, and exhaustion are the reason they closed their store. It had nothing to do with the big businesses. Nothing.
Most people don’t know what a physical struggle it is to keep a small local business running. They can’t see the exhaustion that is the real reason the local businesses close.