Our communities are under attack, and it’s time we take them back.
Big brands suck, literally. They suck the money, resources, and life out of our communities in exchange for what appears to be convenience and cost savings. Long term, they’re anything but convenient. They wipe out small businesses and replace a greater number of higher paying jobs with a smaller number of lower paying jobs, and the cost savings are eventually offset by lower income for most. Big brands suck money from the bottom and pool it at the top, increasing income disparity and making the world a worse place to live in.
Why Small Business Is Better
- When you buy from a small, local business, more of your money stays in your community. It’s good for the local employees and owners, and it’s good for you.
- Small businesses offer a better customer service experience with employees who are more likely to care. Big brands are staffed largely by low paid employees and outsourced customer service.
- Unique, small businesses make your community more interesting.
- Big brand executives don’t care about your community, but small business owners do. It’s their community too.
- Small businesses are more social. It’s more likely you’ll get to know the owners and employees of a small business, and the experience of shopping will be more enjoyable.
- Small businesses are specialists in the products they carry, and both online and offline the shopping experience is likely to be better as a result.
With Big Brands, You Pay More Than You Think
Big brands like Walmart take out physical businesses around the world by offering cheap prices enabled by paying wages so low that many employees to supplement their income. Walmart prices only seem cheap when you don’t consider you’re paying many of their underpaid employees with your tax dollars.
And these big brands aren’t satisfied with monster profits and the destruction of small physical businesses. Now with the , one of the worst big brands of all, they’re going after small businesses online too. In a previous post I highlighted how Walmart was selling products online that they don’t even carry, getting a cut of sales dollars by using their authority to rank above the company that actually sells the products.
Amazon: The New Walmart
Amazon is the online equivalent to Walmart, only worse. The shopping experience on Amazon for many product categories is seriously inferior to small online businesses that specialize in those products. But by having businesses compete in a price race to the bottom or , Amazon is often able to offer lower prices. However, these come at the cost of real jobs and income for small business owners, not to mention an expert level of knowledge and customer service. Due to Google’s massive big brand bias combined with their immunity to penalties like Panda and Penguin, many searchers these days don’t even find the specialty e-commerce stores since the first page of results is loaded with Amazon and other big brand sites.
The Big Banks Are the Worst
And the big brand retail stores are nothing compared to the big banks. If it isn’t enough that Goldman Sachs and others to investors, cities, and pension funds…products they created in order to bet against to profit when retirees lost their savings…the same big banks have been caught (stealing money from retirement accounts, hospitals, police and fire departments, etc.) and to the tune of trillions of dollars.
Because all of these big brands control the political process and write the laws, no matter who we elect it’s only going to get worse. Unless we do something about it.
Shop Small Business
Avoid the big brands as much as possible. If you can buy something at a local store or a privately owned e-commerce site, do that over buying from the big brands. It may cost a bit more on the surface, but in the long run it will make your community a better place by keeping the money local, improving prosperity, and maintaining or increasing quality customer service.
Drive a little further or put up with parking issues to shop local instead of at the big box stores. Use a small local bank instead of a monstrous national or international one. Skip all the big brands in the search results even if you have to go to page 2 or 3, and check out the specialist sites. Tweet and email this post to friends, and recommend it on Facebook. The more people you can get using small businesses instead of big brands, the better it will be for us all…especially those of us with small businesses ourselves!
I want to agree with you. Everything you say is aligned with my values, I see the same dangers, want the world to be more like when I was growing up, but then … I don’t really want it to be like that. Do I want to wait in lines, have the store “order” the product for me, call them on the phone and wait until someone tells me that they don’t have that item and don’t have it in any of their other stores either?
A small vendor is inefficient, isn’t really price competitive and unless the product or service they offer requires some particular expertise, they don’t add much value. The modern, mass-produced product has killed the need for the small reseller. Back when products needed servicing, having a relationship with a local store made sense. That’s no longer the case. Everything got commoditized. Whether that’s good or not is worthy of another post.
Lately, whenever I go to a local vendor another chunk of my motivation to participate in the “local” game gets chipped away. Local vendors are open during limited times, sometimes aren’t in the shop when their hours of operation say they should be (often without explanation or a ‘be right back’ sign), they don’t have good (or any!) internet presence, you can’t check stock and availability, they can’t transfer goods from another location within 24 hours, they try to sell you stuff from previously opened (or returned) boxes, and they think that all of this is worth a premium, 20, 30, 40, 50% over the price I can get over the internet.
Small Internet vendors tend to be better, and only because they have to compete against the big ones. But my experience with them has not been anywhere near Amazon. Amazon bunches orders together, ships promptly, has an automated, no-call return system, their web site is a century ahead of any small vendor, their descriptions and pictures tend to be very good. Suggestions, reviews, bundling suggestions, external links, all of that adds real value. Only occasionally does another vendor, and only in the case of very specialized merchandise (say sweetwater.com), offer better descriptions or pictures of the product.
Amazon offers dispute resolution that is real protection. I’ve had a small vendor out of Canada refuse a return of a misadvertised software item which we opened only to find that it’s an upgrade (priced like the full product). They were very stern and offered no recourse until I filled out a simple Amazon form. It was like a sledge hammer. 5 minutes later I got a super apologetic email. They were suddenly cooperative, asking to please remove the complaint because that would’ve ruined their chance to sell anything else on Amazon.
I think we have to accept that for anything but the most specialized stuff the small vendor is dead. They are not dead because the big stores are waging an evil campaign against them, but because the big stores provide better value. I really wish and hope that small vendors can carve out a new niche for themselves. Perhaps provide some new value “on the ground” that Amazon can’t counter. Until then Amazon will sweep everything in its path. And the best locals will sell under its wing, but now globally. So a small, agile class of local stores have been given an opportunity in the new scheme of things, as rotten as it may be.
Regarding banks, I am totally with you.
Thank you for the thoughtful comment Mario.
First, the issues you brought up, which are largely customer service issues, are partially irrelevant to my message. Regardless of whether you’ve experienced better or worse service from small businesses, the big brands are still destroying our communities via a net loss of jobs, lower pay, removing diversity, etc. I would argue that even if service was better with the big brands, you’d still be better off shopping at small businesses due to the long term consequences.
Addressing your points though…
You said a small vendor is inefficient and isn’t really price competitive. Part of that when it’s actually true, if not most of it, is due to lack of scale and better earnings for the owners and employees. So you can pay a lower price at big box stores where employees aren’t paid wages they can live on, but that lower price has a cost to society which translates to indirect costs to you. It’s just harder to see and it may take longer for the negative consequences to materialize. Regarding inefficiencies, small business pay PEOPLE to ship their products vs. a one-off expense for a mechanized warehouse. You may get a product faster when dealing with a big brand, but again, what are you financing? And, you may not get your product any faster.
On small businesses not adding value…again, consider the value they add to your community in prosperity and diversity, if you don’t think they’re adding expertise in the case of commodities.
I disagree, in my experience, with the customer service and efficiency points related to big brands. I’ve had horrible experiences with them…far worse than with small businesses. When I bought my first house for example, Home Depot installed the counter tops. Instead of taking one month to get the counter tops in, it took 3 months. They destroyed one of our kitchen cabinets, and there was nothing we could do to get them to pay for the damages. They stonewalled and eventually put us in touch with their lawyers. I’ve had similar problems buying appliances from Best Buy, etc., etc.
I’ve seen the “be right back” signs frequently in Europe, but I very rarely see them in the US. Sure, I can shop online in the middle of the night…but most small businesses *I* buy from do have decent websites…so if I’d like to buy something when a small business is closed, I can do so on their website. If they don’t have a website and you want to shop late at night, you can always choose a more up to date small business.
Regarding Amazon…what many people don’t realize is that a very large percentage of the products for sale at Amazon are shipped from small businesses anyway. So you’re not dealing with Amazon customer service. You’re dealing with small businesses you think are expensive and inefficient. (If you were to buy from them direct you may even get the products cheaper, and just as fast.) The problem is that Amazon is stepping into the middle and taking out their cut, decreasing income for many and handing it up to a few. You could argue that these businesses don’t need to sell on Amazon. And it’s true that no one is forcing them to do so. But because everyone is shopping on Amazon now (precisely the problem I posted about!) and Google is ranking the big brands above all else, these businesses can either choose to sell very little or get a significant cut taken by the new gate keepers.
I VERY much disagree with Amazon being centuries ahead of small business sites. While they do have more in the form of user generated content (users working for them for free), the shopping experience for many products is horrible. They’re not set up specifically to sell a particular product class, and as a result, for many product class searches you just get a massive list of random products you’re not interested in. On niche e-commerce sites, you get logical categories and sub-categories where you can drill down to exactly what you’re looking for. Now, if you already know exactly what product you want, Amazon may have more information provided by users. Again though, there is a large negative cost to society that should be considered before buying from them.
No doubt some small businesses have bad service and inefficiency issues. But big brands can be just as bad, and with big brands it’s often impossible to talk to anyone who actually cares. The bigger issue though is what the big brands are doing to our communities…to the world at large.
Here’s what else big business is doing. They set up their ugly container-like stores on the outskirts of towns and sap the life out of urban centers. Instead of having a bakery, a hardware store, or a flower shop, you now have closed shops and everyone driving way further to get to their favorite big box store, needlessly polluting the environment. And while already existing retail space in town centers is left blighted, big box stores take up massive amounts of land with their superstores, including parking lots and roads leading to and from the stores.
Once at the big box store, you get to purchase cheap crap made in China. Sure, it’s convenient because you’ll find everything you need and then some, but you better hope you don’t have any questions about the product you want to purchase, because there’s nobody there to give you any qualified answers. Then you take your cheap purchase home, only to find out a week later that it’s already broken. So you go back to Walmart and buy more of the same, fueling a never ending spiral of waste, cheap labor (both in China and the US), and thoughtless consumption.
And those awesome product reviews you see on Amazon’s website? Well, there are lots of companies out there which provide endless amounts of customer reviews, courtesy of people in India who write them for a few cents.
As far as the superiority of Amazon’s website goes, I beg to differ. Let’s say you wanted to buy a sleeping bag. is what you get on Amazon. A random mess of 500 sleeping bags that will take you an hour to sift through, including “reviews” and a whole load of “sponsored links”, i.e., paid ads at the bottom of each page.
And is what you get on Massey’s Outfitters website. They are a local small business that specializes in outdoor gear and clothing. Although there are no “reviews”, there is a very useful . There are also no ads, but there is a phone number you can call where a real person can help you pick the sleeping bag that’s right for you. You can also visit any of their four or five locations, where qualified sales people assist you. Amazon provides neither.
, Amazon! The world will be a much better place when all independent bookstores are gone.
You have valid reasons to be mad that retailing is going where it’s going. We can find other aspects of our lives that are declining if you apply to them the values of quality, sustainability, whatever you consider is just, etc. My only point is people vote with Dollars and I see them voting for the big stores for a reason.
It seems that you have a genuinely good experience with small retailers. That’s great. And even if you didn’t but still chose to use them to keep them alive, I would admire that. I actually do that myself. But I think that the notion that small retailers provide an inherently better service is false for commodity goods. I also wanted to make a point that so much of what used to be specialty is commodity today. And that’s why small stores are vanishing.
To your point, though, big stores indeed do a lot of damage. Perhaps the worst is that they are monocultures and devastate choice in the long term.
People do “vote” with dollars, but more often than not I don’t think that’s with real consideration. It’s also not always in their best interest. Not only do people buy all sorts of useless crap that’s not good for them on many levels (financial, health, etc.), but they tend to buy what they view as convenient in the short term. One of the worst bogus claims I was taught in economics classes is that people act in their own best interest, that they make purchase decisions based on what they think is best for them. Anyone who believes that is either an ideologue or someone with zero understanding of human nature, consumption, and marketing. My point here is simply that people very often vote with their dollars for reasons that are not good for them or anyone else…aside from the short term gains of the recipients of those dollars.
I understand your point regarding small retailers and commodity goods. I don’t see any reason why the small retailer can’t provide a level of service in selling them that’s equal to that of a big brand though. Some do, some don’t. And the price may be higher. But for me that is outweighed by the cost to society.
The choice issue is another important one. More sellers = more competition, and that’s a good thing in general.