There are a lot of people that _do_ believe there is something noble and moral about mom and pop stores and supporting them. I believe the belief flows from the idea that local communities are important, and such stores are an integral part of them.

To be clear, they're only this successful because they were in early with a lot of cash behind them, and didn't have to charge sales tax. Fairly quickly they got to a size where they could simply steamroll over the competition or buy it, and instead of taking profits, they could reinvest them, because as a future monopoly, they would have free rein to raise prices.

If they were always going to be just a piece of the market, they would have had to show profits for that, what, 15 years that they didn't have to? This put brick and mortar stores at an extreme disadvantage.

Of course they "are successful because consumers prefer them", that's kinda definition of being successful. This is saying nothing. What would be a little more revealing is to give a real explanation of why consumers prefer them. And, as it happens, a whole lot of this explanation would consist of what basically is dumping, very dubious anti-competitive practices and other things that kinda-sorta are considered violating antitrust laws. And sometimes it is so blatant, that I can only admire the virtue of lawyers managing to keep this thing afloat. And antitrust laws exist for a reason as well, because game theory offers plenty of ways to make people choose what is worse for everyone in the long run.

So saying there's nothing intrinsically good about "mom-n-pop" stores compared to what Amazon is is a very dubious thing to say. To re-iterate, sure, consumers chose Amazon for a reason, but things are not black-and-white and deciding if something is good or bad is far more nuanced than just that.