i live down south and keep seeing local business owners posting in local groups pleading people to come buy shit at their stores prior to this winter storm because if they have to close for a few days it’s apparently detrimental for them. like they’re entitled to exist. in any other context this behavior would be considered desperate and begging. but we’re conditioned to think small business tyrants are some class above us all who are entitled to not have to work a job like the rest of us. worst case scenario they lose their business and that’s what happens, and working people are conditioned to feel sorry for them. “please don’t let me become underpaid by some asshole exactly like myself!!!”
Not only do I hate small businesses as much as big ones, I actually hate them more than big ones.
Big businesses don’t try in super petty ways to break the law to steal my money. By and large big businesses are operated by huge numbers of people each of which has very little stake in the outcome, and so they aren’t trying super hard to screw you personally. They make their profits on economies of scale.
Small businesses have a couple of people who will benefit immensely, like 1 to 1, if they screw you over. Every dollar they can avoid paying you is a dollar in their pocket instead. They make their profits on the margin of “How much can I exploit my workforce”
This goes double for landlords. Corporate landlords suck but they hire staff who just have jobs to do. The maintenance guy at the corporate apartment complex doesn’t have to pay out of pocket to replace your washing machine, he just orders a new one from their existing supplier, and replaces it in a few days. The mom and pop slumlord dodges your texts for days, then tries to fix it themself, then calls a guy out to look at it, and then eventually replaces it while whining to you the whole time about how expensive it is.
In the US at least, large corporations are also at least theoretically beholden to the small number of (admittedly anemic) labor and safety regulations we have. Small businesses are often just straight up exempt, and so can get away with being dangerous hellholes for employees to work in without really any meaningful recourse. If you work on a large corporate farm, for instance, there are a huge number of safety regulations surrounding how you interact with grain silos. Output chutes are required to have lockouts for when people enter the silo, it’s mandatory to have safety equipment on-site, the silos have to be designed with escape mechanisms, and so on. If you’re just a
kulaksmol bean family farmer, though, you can send your 12 year old kid in to “walk down the grain” without even closing the output chute, and it’s totally legal. Guess where the vast majority of grain entrapment injuries and deaths happen.One of the things that really made me sour on small businesses was a local coffee i shop i worked at 10 years ago or whatever. It had a great local reputation, wasnt huge, in fact it was REALLY damn small, but people loved it. Been in the same spot for 40 years, maybe 50 now.
The kid (grandkid?) worked there with me when I was working. We both made hardly anything, and the place didnt accept credit card tips, only cash, so we were lucky to get $5 a person at the end of the shift.
One day I asked the owners relative when the last time people had gotten a raise was, and he legit had no idea.
Really rubbed me the wrong way.
They usually bend the law in very specifically planned ways to try and steal small amounts of lots and lots of people’s money. Less so the petty shit.
Walmart isn’t just going in and changing people’s submitted hours, Dino Ravioli who owns a shithole restaurant in small town central Florida is.
Except Walmart and similar big corpos are very frequently fucking over workers and not paying their worked hours. To take Walmart as an example, they only recently settled a 2.5 million dollar lawsuit for doing exactly that.
Claiming that big companies aren’t regularly and openly doing wage theft is quite a wild claim to see here.
Amazon makes warehouse workers do up to 30 minutes of unpaid checkout procedure to make sure they aren’t shoplifting. Wells Fargo gave unachiviable account opening goals on its bankers pressuring them into making fake accounts. Various banks applied over draft charges largest to smallest to optimize the amount of overdraft fees. Johnson and Johnson lied about OxyContin being a safe non addictive pain killer and basically started the opioid crisis in America. This is just a small sampling of big business crimes. The evil might not have the personal touch but it is greater.