I was reading about some local policy changes intended to make running a small business easier and that got me thinking. I go to restaurants and ethnic food stores which are usually small businesses, and maybe some of the gas stations I use are small businesses too. However, everything else I buy comes from big-box stores or the internet. These have replaced a lot of small businesses, but how is it that there are any little shops left at all? Sometimes I walk into a corner store because I don’t want to go all the way to the big box store or wait for delivery but the prices are so much higher (often by over a hundred percent) that I walk right out again unless I need something very urgently.
I’m not making a moral judgement here. I just don’t know how the economics work out.
True, but be careful, many of those you list appear to be small business because the big corporate owners have decided to have different name out front which makes it look like small business but they are not. You can tell because they are trying to sell you “services” that you don’t need.
I mean, “small business” can still get pretty big. You can bring in $40M with 1500 employees and still be clarified as “small”.
Show me a business that doesn’t. 😛
There’s plenty of gray area - franchises can be privately owned despite hosting a big brand logo, retailers can have boutique letterheads despite all being part of some corporate megalith (Laundry’s loves doing this shit), an office can be part of a group, a consultant can only have one or two clients and effectively operate as an off-book extension of the parent company, yadda yadda yadda.
But for the most part, the guy running the auto shop on the run down lot at the corner is independent. And you’ll know it when they go bankrupt in the next downturn, then get replaced by a Starbucks.