Hacker News Reader

I don't understand this fetish with small businesses. For certain industries they're great, but for retail? Many still pay minimum wage with no benefits, so the only one you're helping enrich is the owner who treats their employees as expendable. On top of that, retail really benefits from economies of scale, it's simply more efficient for both you and the business. That efficiency gets passed on to the economy to be spent elsewhere.

View on HN

> retail really benefits from economies of scale, it's simply more efficient for both you and the business. That efficiency gets passed on to the economy to be spent elsewhere.

Seems more likely to be passed on to shareholders of the large-scale business. And compared to being put into circulation (with a much higher multiplier) in the local small-scale economy, funneling some more moolah into the already overflowing coffers of the Waltons or Bezoses does pretty much diddly-squat for the economy as a whole.

Glad someone talked from the employee's angle, that's something I have been wondering for a while too.

I can't even remember the last time being a customer of "local businesses" other than restaurants, and don't see a reason to do so, morally or financially.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com