The large-scale loss of small business has sent us careening into a spiritual black hole
Why is it that a healthy cluster of thriving, locally owned businesses provides an area with a shared identity, cohesion, vitality, and community? Why have you heard of Asheville, North Carolina, but not Kettering, Ohio, the standard issue southwest Ohio suburb where I grew up? And what, exactly, distinguishes a shopping mall from a neighborhood?
The answer is that proper neighborhoods and the interesting small towns like Asheville that we’re subconsciously magnetized to are places where individuals with deep ties to the area own and operate businesses. These business owners are people who, by necessity, must be invested in the place they live and operate. And who, being human, also have a deep potential capacity and even need for connection, generosity, and mutual support.
Shopping malls, by contrast, represent top-down, centralized planning by some distant power. They operate within the zombie mandate of the corporate model—maximum extraction from minimum investment.
And by virtue of the way malls, including most strip malls, are designed and constructed—featuring enormous parking lots and massive, squat, interchangeable cinderblock buildings—they all but necessitate population by corporate outlets like Walmart, Chipotle, Walgreens, Target, Chili’s, Dollar General, McDonalds, Marshalls, Taco Bell, and so on.
These areas quickly become spiritual dead zones.
Now, I get that the use of the word spiritual here might throw you off. That’s okay, you could also substitute lifeless, soul-crushing, alienating, or any other such word that appeals to you. What I really mean is that these places and businesses, operating within the zombie mandate of the corporate model, destroy the very essence of what makes us human. In other words, they destroy our ability to relate with each other, form a bond that goes beyond market-mediated transactions, and come together to solve local issues.
There was a time when we implicitly understood that the existence of thriving, locally owned businesses translates directly to local autonomy, a unique shared identity, and a perpetual wellspring of common prosperity. At this point, though, I’m not convinced we even notice the extent to which corporate consolidation has captured the local markets we once vigorously defended for ourselves with the full power of federal law. (If you’re curious to read more about the laws we once had and enforced around local control, and how we lost them, I highly recommend Goliath, by Matt Stoller, or this short article by Philip Mattera).
Meet me at the corner of Burger King and Target
When I visit Kettering, there’s admittedly not much on my list of must-see places. I might swing by the old house, or maybe drive past the high school football stadium. I might notice that the Taco Bell is now a Caribou Coffee, or that Fazoli’s is now a Burger King.
But the only places I’m legitimately interested in and consistently drawn to year-after-year are locally owned restaurants. I might hit up a donut shop in Centerville (Bill’s Donuts), a take-out Chinese place (Young Chow Carryout), or a local pizza joint (Marion’s Piazza).
Let’s focus on Marion’s for a second. Because, well, it’s the spot.
It evokes memories that are specific to me and my childhood. It serves as a gathering place for relatives, friends, little league teams, graduation parties, birthdays. It offers a shared identity, a common ground, some texture and uniqueness in an area that could otherwise be lifted and dropped wholesale to the suburbs of Columbus, or Salt Lake, or Houston, and nobody would notice.
Now, is the pizza at Marion’s objectively better than, say, Domino’s? Well, there’s no scientifically valid method to measure pizza taste in a quantitative sense, so I guess we’ll never know. But obviously, how the pizza tastes is only one small part of the appeal. It’s not that Marion’s is “just that good.” It’s loved because it’s local. In fact, most “hometowns” have their own favorite local joint. You’re probably thinking of yours now.
Many places also once had their favorite local hardware stores, general stores, pharmacies, diners, music stores, grocers, butchers, and so on—many of which were likely owned and operated by someone from the area. Perhaps the pharmacy owner’s kid was on a soccer team with you or your brother or your kids; or the general store was owned by your aunt, and she gave you your first job when you turned 16; or maybe you owned a hardware store, and through running it, as though fate herself intervened on your behalf, you met the charming man who would, someday, become your dentist.
Some of these places still exist, of course, though they’re increasingly anachronistic, often taken for granted, their importance to the community is either glossed over or ignored entirely, and their existence is miraculous considering the way we’ve intentionally structured our markets at a federal level over the last 50 years.
JR’s Pharmacy gets sold to Walgreens. Mike Tuff Hardware gets hammered by Home Depot. Shreddin’ Jimmy’s Guitar Shop gets shredded by Guitar Center. Denny’s is booming while Big Martha’s Good Eats goes under. Burger King, for some reason, fucking everywhere.
Local ownership—and with it local autonomy—slips from the hands of local citizens, transferred instead to multinational giants whose interests in the town are strictly financial, ultimately severing the invisible ligaments holding the community together.
Maybe losing a few local businesses here and there is no big deal. But there is a point of no return. Once crossed, the sense of community itself is annihilated.
In return for this annihilation, the multinationals claim to offer convenience and cheap stuff. But even when this is true, and quite often it is not, it serves only as a distraction from the destruction of community and the kneecapping of even the possibility that a lively, unique “place” may emerge.
And while it’s perfectly natural for consumers to seek out “rock-bottom” prices, I find a couple of things curious about this mandate. One, why are we living on such a financial knife edge that we’re hopelessly dependent on stuff being made so poorly elsewhere just to be sold cheap here? And two, where, exactly, do these magical low, low prices really come from?
The answer to both questions is answered quite forcefully by the unexamined side of the Rock Bottom Equation®. Namely, that rock-bottom prices are birthed by rock-bottom wages and rock-bottom quality.
To justify these gigantic companies’ domination of our towns and lives, words like “efficiency” and “economies of scale” are often thrown around with quite a bit of harrumphing and condescension. In practice, all this means is that a gigantic, famously anti-union company like Walmart, for example, is able to leverage its massive size to squeeze its employees and suppliers, milking both for every last dime they can. They also make insane demands on local municipalities, like, incredibly, insisting they should be taxed as though their stores are empty and out of business.
This then sets off a chain reaction down the line.
To stay afloat and continue doing business with a company that almost certainly makes up the bulk of their business, a dog toy supplier to Walmart, for example, must then squeeze its own employees and suppliers, while also making the product on the super cheap, which means the toys somehow end up with dangerously high levels of toxic metals like lead, chromium, and cadmium. In addition, their suppliers must then do the same, squeezing employees and suppliers and adulterating products, and so on down the line.
The result might be a cheap-ass dog toy, but its existence serves as a passionate testament to a furious circular firing squad of corporate extortion, and with it the toxic, low-grade things that often wash up on our shelves from countries that uncoincidentally lack enforcement of labor and environmental laws.
Plus, it turns out that big box stores aren’t as cheap as we think, as Stacy Mitchell points out in her incredible, data-rich book, “Big Box Swindle.” Once the big players run the locals out of business, often destroying market access for local makers, farmers, and artisans in the process, their prices frequently rise above where the local stores had them. They also pay lower wages and donate less to the local community.
Plenty of parking, though. :)
Low Prices FTW
In our frantic pursuit of low, low prices at any cost, we’ve undercut our own foundation—our local autonomy and ability to cohere around the most salient and important unifying force there is—that of the place we live.
Instead, distant powers place cheap things in Soviet-style barracks, so we begrudgingly emerge from air-conditioned isolation to collect our necessities in these generic, lifeless environments, pushing through crowds of nameless, irritating “others,” then rapidly return home.
We’re fed through the system efficiently. We don’t linger or enjoy the experience. Most likely, we don’t get to know anyone, and we might even be forced to take on some free labor for the company by handling our own check-out and bagging situation. Our value is extracted and sent out of the area to Corporate HQ, where it’s used to do things like lavish its CEO with a salary that exceeds the GDP of many developing countries, pay its shareholders dividends, and buy back shares to boost its stock price.
It’s a market-mediated transaction. And nothing more.
That’s what I’m driving at here, bro. The bounds set by the extractive corporate model lock the experience and the store’s relationship to us and to the area into that of a succubus, draining our lifeforce and creative human potential.
Because Capitalism
It's tempting, of course, to believe that “business is business,” that “capitalism is capitalism,” but that’s simply not true. There is a fundamental, striking difference between a locally owned restaurant like Big Martha’s Good Eats—operated by Big Martha herself, whose daughter is in the marching band with your son, who works as a fry cook in her restaurant every summer—and a corporate chain like Olive Garden.
To turn entirely toward the corporate behemoths to provide our every necessity and livelihoods and even (gasp) our culture and politics, is to embrace an alien definition of what it means to be human. Not as an intelligent, creative, mutually supportive, community-minded creature with an enormous capacity for compassion and connection—a concept I’m for some reason attempting to encapsulate in the word “spiritual”—but instead as a cold, calculating, utility-maximizing, isolated, Friedman-programmed automaton.
(Worth noting as an aside that demanding the corporations intervene in the political sphere, as has become popular recently, flirts dangerously with the corporate-state fusion at the heart of fascism).
The corporate model turns firmly away from human as creative, as unique, as connected—as citizen—and transforms us all into a passive wave of consumption. It's as though we’re a mudslide complaining down a mountain with little choice but to follow the path of least resistance. In our case that means flowing towards the lowest prices, the most convenient experience, the largest parking lots.
Let’s return a moment to Olive Garden, which is owned by multinational conglomerate Darden Restaurants, a company that operates over 900 restaurants globally across nine different brands and generates billions in annual revenue through the zombie corporate model of cost-cutting married to max-extraction.
In fact, Darden made history in 2012 by making Olive Garden one of the first national restaurant chains to convert most of its staff to part-time to eliminate health care benefits, one year after instituting a mandatory tip-out program that allowed them to cut employee pay to $2.13 per hour. And that, I’m sure, is just barely breaking the surface of what Darden Restaurants is up to in terms of their max-extraction efforts.
Now consider the locally owned yoga studio, or coffee shop, or Italian restaurant staffed by family members and friends plucked straight from Rome by the Italian family who runs it. Consider how these businesses might put artwork on the walls from local artists, how they might vocally support other local businesses and causes that are vitally important to a specific area but of no real interest beyond that.
Consider that the owners can put the entirety of their unique identity into every aspect of the business. And notice how that transforms the experience of being in the space, as well as the street the business exists on and the way it begins to create a comfortable circle for strangers to congregate and begin to recognize each other and even speak to one another—the start of what we call community.
All of this is stripped away with a turn toward the corporate model. If any of it does appear to exist, it does so only as a simulacrum, something the corporate leadership through extensive market testing has identified as a “core value.”
Let’s say “community” is one of those values. It then becomes a professionally written and designed PowerPoint slide that lives within Brand_Deck_FINAL_FINAL_V9.ppt, and which spills across the passive, disinterested gaze of a low-paid new hire, who’s surprised to learn she’s not, in fact, an employee. She’s an “associate” or “partner,” and apparently plays a “critical role in ensuring a warm, inclusive, and joyful environment for our community,” but who is really just figuring out which parts of herself to shut off in order to function “in accordance with company values.”
Blaming the consumer is a distraction
It’s tempting to put the blame for this all on the “consumer.” Aren’t we just being lazy and cheap? I mean, can’t we just band together and buy our stuff elsewhere, even if it costs a little more?
All fair questions, but unfortunately, even if we’d prefer to “shop local” or buy things made in our region or even country, this preference has been largely overridden on a mass scale by the way our markets and local environments have been structured through changes at the federal and local levels over the past 50 years.
I’m talking about changes to the law around antitrust that have fueled once-unthinkable corporate consolidation, plus:
changes to planning and zoning mandates
the lowering or elimination of tariffs
the lack of an effective (or any) industrial policy
subsidies and tax breaks for private equity funds, malls, and corporate giants like Amazon and Walmart, whose growth has been partly funded by local tax dollars from the small businesses they intentionally crush and extort.
Not to mention the fact that wages, meaning purchasing power, are oppressively low for working class labor—and kept that way through the employee designation shenanigans (full-time vs part-time), intentional union-busting, and outsourcing to third-world countries that Wall Street demands.
Part Two: Know Thy Algorithm
Evolution has wired us to always be scanning for threats—to see what’s bad, threatening, ominous, lethal. In other words, to use a famous example, if you’re walking in the woods, it’s better for your unconscious/emotional brain to treat a stick on the path as though it’s a snake, because the opposite scenario—of treating a snake as though it’s a stick—could kill you.
This was incredibly useful for our ancestors in terms of keeping them alive long enough to produce more ancestors. But for us, it means our brain and nervous system are both wildly maladapted to Surveillance Capitalism—a system that’s spawned the scorched-earth-anger-core of our algorithmically-mediated social media echo chambers and online environments, all of which are largely controlled and operated by a teeny-tiny collection of massively powerful corporations.
Our phones have us. That’s the simplest way to put it. Because they touch parts of our brain we cannot access. Reward centers, threat sensors, other parts we don’t understand or have conscious control over.
What we see and experience online doesn’t stay there, is what I’m saying. The algorithms have jumped—they now live within the intimate wirings of the synaptic pasta bowl that’s our brain.
What we think about and how we think about it. Who we believe we are or should be. Who our friends or enemies are or should be. What we should look like and what our friends and lovers and family members should look like. What’s wrong with the world, and what’s gone so wrong with the despicable “other” who’s ruining everything, DAMMIT.
All of this and more are mediated by the algorithmic lockbox of our phones, where our thoughts and emotions are captured and electrified by the whims of the algorithm.
But perhaps you object here
People are merely creating and sharing content about their lives for these platforms, you retort, what’s so wrong with that? To which I reply that you have it exactly backwards. The reality is that the platforms are dictating how they live their lives so they’ll create the content the algorithm demands.
Where they go and what they wear and what they eat (Paleo? Vegan? Low Carb? No Carb? Carnivore? Fasting, like those weird meals of empty plates in Severance?) and how they pose for pictures and what they say in their captions and videos—it all connects back in some way to the algorithm.
To give a specific example, I’ve seen multiple Instagram posts from a brilliant, local tattoo artist where she’s provided shots of herself in her underwear because, according to the text accompanying her photos, she’d had low engagement recently and needed to feed the algorithm. There’s also a recent trend, as reported by Ted Gioia, of average song long lengths plummeting to sub-minute levels, as musicians must now write increasingly brief songs to match the demands of the algorithm.
Nearly all the provided content on these platforms seeks, even if “merely” on a deeply subconscious level, to ride the wave the platforms dictate as socially desirable content. Or, quite possibly, it reacts against the platform’s “acceptable” discourse, which has its own wave of self-styled “rebels” in metaphorical leather jackets smoking metaphorical Marlboros doing their own liking and clicking.
Both are flip sides of the same coin, as the pure open space of unknown possibility is increasingly closed off.
This comes at a particularly tragic time, as so many of what were once the shared spaces of locally owned business—places where we might interact with people we’d never otherwise meet—have been supplanted by corporate businesses, places where interactions among strangers are severely limited or nonexistent.
Social media, then, has become the de facto shared space, though it’s anything but. It’s not a shared space in the sense of being a place where people who at least have local or regional common ground are open to having an interaction with a stranger that’s not spring loaded from the onset.
City-focused subreddits perhaps come closest to this, but they tend to be dominated by a particular “hive mind” mentality that’s often brutally unkind to dissenters, “downvoting” them into oblivion. Discord, lacking an algorithm and simply delivering messages “old school” (in chronological order), does show some promise in this area, though the groups are typically self-selected and centered on a particular topic or interest, narrowing the conversations by necessity and/or mod-enforced rules.
So yeah, sure, perhaps some users are doing this neutral-mindset-searching-for-answers-and-connection-thing online—most are not. How could they?
The algorithm quickly learns the nuclear codes that fire up our wrathful demonic energy, filling our bloodstream with hot spit and nails, and repeatedly slings the juiciest, most fury-inducing content at our faces. This is partly what keeps us obsessed with the idiotic other—be they “COVIDiots,” “Libtards,” “right-wing fucktards,” “the looney left,” “NIMBYs”, etc.
It’s no coincidence that our undying rage practically guarantees we’ll comment, share, and like—and, most importantly, ensures that we’ll continue donating our attention to the platform, which sells it to the highest bidder.
Every day I watch drivers gun their Potemkin-sized SUVs past my house at 54 mph while staring into their lap. I watch people walking dogs, or themselves, with their heads straight down, locked onto their phone, oblivious to their surroundings. You could shoot a gun in the air and they might glance up for a second. Then post something about it.
Further, the more we’re cut off from our local environment, the more alienated from it and unable to engage, as is the case with a top-down, sterile, corporate-run area, the more we must by necessity get pulled into the abstract rage space of social media. Because where else can we turn to fulfill our innate human need for connection and problem solving?
Our focus, then, is pulled away from local challenges, the things we might actually have a say in and solve, because it’s laser-focused on whatever raging’s around the internet, which typically involves problems so large and abstract they can only induce despair.
We might miss out on opposing a big box store going up in our area, or not bothering to use our statistically significant vote in a city council election, because we’re so focused on something impossibly nebulous and beyond the scope of any one person, like “ending capitalism” or “extinguishing racism” or “demolishing the Dems.”
What’s more, the normalization of abstract rage interaction among online users boomerangs right back into interactions amongst those in the physical world. I recently witnessed a woman step out of her house to scream at a couple taking pictures across the street because they hadn’t received explicit permission from the homeowner whose house they were casually using as a backdrop. The lady was practically foaming at the mouth and dropped the weirdest credential flex I’ve ever personally heard, declaring herself a “copyright lawyer.” It felt, in every way, the kind of interaction you might see amongst strangers on Twitter or Facebook.
My point here is that, when real local issues actually come up, such as adding bike lanes or upzoning a neighborhood, for example, the dialogue between neighbors or groups who disagree about the issue is bound to be supercharged with the same fury and invective-hurtling and groupthink we’ve been conditioned by the internet to see as normal.
In Conclusion
There is, ultimately, a direct connection between the rise of alienation and the unprecedented rise of corporate consolidation—both online and in terra firma—that’s taken place in the US over the last fifty years. Alienation leads to a sense that you have no voice in your neighborhood, your town, your career, your country, your life. It creates the very real sense that distant, shadowy powers are in control, which can only lead to feelings of anger and despair. And though the conclusions these feelings engender, of colorful conspiracy theories fully disconnected from reality, the question itself—of who, exactly, is in charge here?—is perfectly valid.