So they're indistinguishable from a local business other than having corporate amounts of capital to weather storms, policies to control workers and inventory (what books to stock), and they send their profits out of the community. Neat
This is good. Means they're less likely to be impacted by temporary fads and I can count on them being around in a decade
> Policies to control workers and inventory
Policies are good and usually law abiding. Meaning that they treat their employees fairly, pay taxes and obey labor laws or they'll get sued.
> send their profits out of the community
The main beneficiaries are the patrons and people working there, who are as likely to live in the community than a mom and pop shop. The profit margin, if any, accrues to stock holders which are widely distributed to people with 401ks pensions and others. I'm okay with that
The existence of a policy doesn't make it fair, in fact the reason I abhor 1-size-fits-all policies is because of places like Amazon warehouses where you're fired for being late X times ("sorry, it's policy, my hands are tied :( ). Corporate policies are there to protect the company from lawsuits, and as a consequence they erode the agency of individuals which is literally dehumanizing. It's one step away from a human and one toward a robot. people should be treated like humans.
Treating someone like a human doesn't mean firing someone for being late while not firing someone that does the same thing. Make the late policy lenient and applied consistently. That's more human
That is before we get into whether or not those policies treat people well.
But I don't have a good alternative, other than more and better policies I suppose...
For example, go to a pub in the UK - it's almost always owned by Greene King which itself is owned by a Hong Kong holding company called CK Asset Holdings [0] that has also provided VC to startups like Siri.
Or in North America, AB InBev and Molson Coors now have significant or majority ownership in most breweries, juice, and sparkling water companies, and according to a buddy of mine working at one of those are looking into taking minority ownership positions in local coffee shops and bars.
If Publishers had capital, they probably would have considered doing something similar with community bookstores. Heck, Barnes and Nobles operates the Harvard Coop and the MIT Coop (the student bookstores for Harvard and MIT)
P.S. Before the inevitable MBA bashing starts up, Private Equity and IB doesn't really hire from MBA programs (Wharton, Booth, GSB, and CBS are the only exceptions) - they prefer hiring directly out of undergrad at a couple target schools (Ivies, MIT, Claremont Colleges, UChicago, Northwestern, Stanford, Duke, USC, SMU, UC Berkeley Haas+EECS, UCLA, NYU Stern, UMich Ross, UT McCombs, GTown McDonough) and train internally. MBAs tend to end up in operational roles such as Consulting, Tech, or (if you were a flamed out ex-IB/PE/VC or attended undergrad abroad) VC-IB-PE.