[smeej]

I think this is true of businesses that outgrow their local economies. And since that's what most people see in their feeds and interact with every day, that's how they expect every company to function.

When every company that has any mind share is beholden to a bunch of external shareholders, it's no wonder "profit as much as possible" is the only reason for being anyone thinks of.

But it didn't used to be this way and it doesn't have to be this way. It's still possible for people to do well by doing good, providing, for example, quality housing at non-exploitative prices, or reliable and safe plumbing to handle their neighbors' water and sewer needs. And it still is being done.

Most of us just spend so much of our time online that we only ever hear about the companies with social media/marketing teams, so we get used to that way of thinking.

[harimau777]

I think that it may not be just that people are spending too much time reading about non-local corporations. Rather, it may be that many industries today are not viable to operate at a local level. E.g. it's not really possible to have a small town semi-conductor fab. Even in software development, there's probably not much need for local companies besides certain more simple applications like WordPress sites.

[smeej]

Even so, it's not the only alternative is gigantic companies trying to get everyone using their product.

If every plumber in your area had a subscription to your software that was specifically tailored to your codes and the nuances of your area? Estimating costs based on actual local prices for things? Could you support the number of people it would take to keep such a thing running? Could you sell insights from the data to the local hardware store to help them figure out what kinds of changes (weather, construction, whatever) lead to what kinds of demand for products?

It doesn't have to be "you could walk to it" local, but if you really created the tool your area's local businesses couldn't live without, could you really not support yourself?

[harimau777]

A lot of people prioritize working on software that intellectually stimulating. If someone is an expert in medical simulation, sonar, VLSI, etc. I don't think that they would consider developing plumbing software to be an equivalent job.

[smeej]

If they're an expert in medical simulation or sonar, aren't they likely already working for a relatively small company, and one that's located near, say, a hospital center like Boston, or an ocean? That's still a service within their locale and to their local community, even if the local community is also engaged in specialty work that benefits the whole world.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

Small businesses have gradually been losing the fight to vertically integrated, more efficient corporations for several decades. I think these corporations genuinely play a larger role in our lives than before.

[galdosdi]

It's not just internet marketing. The 0.1% largest businesses in the USA represent around 60% of our GDP, and about half our employment. People really do interact with big business a lot. And the share for big business has only been gradually getting bigger over the last few decades.

Today we talk of globalization, but the mid to late twenteith century was the heyday of nationalization, of small local and regional businesses like the ones you describe -- businesses that were linked to and cared about their local communities or regions -- getting bought up and consolidated into large national businesses -- local owners getting replaced with hourly shift managers with less autonomy and incentive to care.

Today's American may wake up in their Toll Brothers built house, take a morning poop on their American Standard toilet, brush their teeth with Proctor & Gamble products, walk down the stairs built with wood from the Home Depot, pour themselves a bowl of Kellog's cereal into dishes and on a table bought from Ikea, read the news a bit on their Apple device, step into their Ford car sitting on their driveway built of asphalt made by Koch Industrial, then drive to work, stopping for gas at an ExxonMobil gas station, pulling in to their job as shift manager at a TGI Friday's, where they spend their day serving food made from ingredients bought from Sysco, the national distributor, ultimately bought from a few large processed food companies like whoever owns Kraft / Philip Morris these days.... finally after a long day they drive home, stopping at Wal*Mart for some essentials, finishing off the day with the refreshing taste of a Bud Lite.

It's frankly amazing small business still managed to produce 40% of our GDP, but make no mistake, it has been and is being driven to the least profitable margins and corners of every industry. Small business gets to operate the restaurant while big business owns the real estate. Small business gets to owner-operate tractor trailers while big business gets the lions' share of the actual retail profits. Etc, etc -- small business is increasingly stuck with the left over pieces that are too unprofitable for big business.

Unintentional or not, squeezing out small business owners from their share of the pie has been the process for big capital for decades. We talk a lot about how big capital has been trying to squeeze down the piece of the pie labor gets since the 70s, but we forget that small capital has also been the victim of this.

I live next to a Target. It's run by a handful of minimum wage high school kids and a couple of managers who probably earn $40k and have no standing in the community, no share in the success of the business, no way to grow along with it, and no discretion to change their store's behavior to accomodate any local community interest other than distant, distant shareholders getting more profits.

A few decades ago instead there would have been multiple stores, each with an OWNER who had all those things -- standing in the community, ownership over the profits, and the discretion to make decisions not purely on profit but also caring about the community they're indelibly tied up with. And this owner could pass the business to their kids, which the Target manager can't do either.