5784

https://www.costco.com/protein.html

5785

Adam is making a joke based on the use of ‘ripped’ rather than ‘ripped off.’ Just in case that’s not clear.

5786

thanks, no it wasn’t. I had no idea what swole mean. Us fat 60-year-olds are kinda the opposite of ripped.

5787

You met Bill Clinton?! Cool! He and Hillary live one town over from me but I still haven’t encountered either of them. A bunch of friends have selfies with them at Starbucks or wherever.

Absolutely. Way back when he was pulling ahead in the primaries, triggercut posted an anecdote that reminded me of this and got me excited to vote for him. The fact that my daughters were with me is why I wish I could have had the presence of mind to specifically thank him for being a good role model in that way that goes beyond politics. (The silent subtext being especially compared to that former guy, AMIRITE?!)

Anyway, I’m done feeling bad in any way about this experience. It was an absolute treat. I just went through all my photos for the first time and found a few more worth sharing… you can see doctor-of-education: Jill Biden, talking with doctor-of-history: my mom, some of the secret service agents in action when Joe first stepped in (yikes), and my sister with Joe plus some granddaughters, Hunter, and baby Beau behind them.

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5788

I want them to remain at a sustainable size that serves their community, keeps them tied to that community, and affords their owners and employees a living wage. How big that is, and how big a community they serve (city/town/neighborhood) I would think depends on the industry.

What do you think: If there were 2 to 4 bookstores in my town of a little under 70,000 and everyone went to one of them for all their book-buying needs instead of Amazon or the Barnes & Noble that’s in the next city over… could those stores pay their (let’s say) dozen or so employees a living wage and benefits? And afford to take returns? And would buyers pay more for the books if they knew that that money went to the clerks they chatted with in the store instead of into the coffers at the corporate headquarters in Sacramento to pay for a new branch in Phoenix or Stockholm, or for a bigger bonus for the CEO or to stockholder dividends? Oh also these bookstores don’t burn out warehouse workers trying to fill Christmas orders, or roll over when the Chinese government censors their product offering, or delay moon landings.

Maybe those numbers don’t work out. Maybe we can’t have nice things without exploiting workers and pandering to tyrants and disrupting the space program. At the moment I (naively) would love to try and see if maybe we could.

5789

Here’s the problem. There are probably some industries that could work. Retail? Yeah there isn’t anything inherent that requires large companies. Other than efficiency and cost structures really.

Let me give some specifics. In my town the biggest companies are Intel and Nike. There is no local version that is possible. You could possibly have a regional shoe maker, but how far do you go? Do you use local materials? Well so much for rubber soles. And good luck if you live in a rural town. At the end of the day your notion is going to require lower quality, higher cost, less options, and generally worse for everyone. I mean if you are a runner and the only local shoe maker makes cowboy boots? Or they can’t make your size because at regional scale it isn’t worth making for the 20 people.

And good lord, Intel? This is pretty self evidently impossible. Goodbye computers.

Also you work on video games. How many people worked on Life is Strange or Beast Breaker? Aside from the obvious, what of the underlying tech? The engines the games are built on? Would Denver support a company building game engines? And if they could, would it be affordable for a game maker? And would they have enough local talent to make a game? And would enough people locally want it? And never mind the fact we already mentioned the hardware could not exist in a purely small company regional context.

Like your idea may sound good, but at a fundamental level it would require a pre industrial revolution society and standard of living.

I am certainly all for reigning in multinational companies. But the idea of a 100 person company leading to some utopian societal structure just doesn’t pan out.

5790

And the people living in the town of 5000 that can’t support even one book shop, well they’d better get on with the program and move to a town of just the right size? Or not read, I guess.

The above isn’t entirely theoretical.

France has an old law that banned discounts for newly released books, to make sure that big chains couldn’t compete on price. To make that restriction relevant in the modern world, and since the French politicians absolutely loathe Amazon, they’ve very recently passed law that will set a minimum shipping fee on online book purchases (expected to be around $5).

This seems to be exactly the kind of thing you want. It’s also going to be kind of disgusting in practice, since it’ll basically be a regressive tax on the poorest. They’re the least likely to have an easily accessible bookstore, so they’re the ones who’ll end up paying more.

5791

To be honest, depending 2-4 bookstores to supply me with books, especially when I read a lot of them, won’t make me happy. Still, I can understand the attraction to some people.

My argument is just doesn’t work in real life. Hawaii is sort of the perfect case, a completely isolated market, store owners conspired to keep prices high and wages low, and fought like hell to keep big-boxy retailers out… They simply lied and said that shipping was responsible, for sneaker, steaks, books and jeans costing 30-100% more than the mainland. The reality is shipping adds less than 5% to cost, even with Jones Act in effect. Same thing happen to my parents when they moved to 1,000 person town in Southern Oregon in the mid 1970s. The normal size grocery store, prices were outrageous. My mom, was a smart shopper and shopped in the population 15,000 town, which had several markets. My dad didn’t know better, and shopped there and remarked how friendly everyone was.

Decades, later a Walmart open 25 minutes away, and suddenly the prices in the grocery store dropped. Store owners charged what the market will bear, this isn’t global capitalism problem, I’m sure shop owners in ancient Greece did the same thing.

5792

Setting aside the issue that there are a lot of towns smaller than 70k so you’re basically ignoring the book-buying needs of those people, there is absolutely no reason to believe that ‘small business owners’ are going to pay living wages to their employees or provide them with benefits. We know this because we can see what they do right now, what they have done for generations. And they will not be providers of so-called good jobs with a future; what actually is the future for a book-store clerk in a single book store?

I suppose you could legislate to make small businesses pay more and offer decent benefits, but you could do that right now, if all it takes to make it happen is a magic wand that causes Congress to get in line behind the idea. So what’s the different between your idea and, say, a plan for a higher minimum wage and more mandatory benefits and no exemptions for small businesses, paired to much higher and more effective top marginal tax rate on large-income businesses? Presumably it is some kind of taxpayer subsidy for small businesses, funded by that higher tax rate on larger ones?

5793

I wouldn’t have said that, but I would certainly have been thinking it so loudly he might have heard it anyway.

5794

I’m just an “aim at your target” kind of guy. If what you want is a living wage and to reduce the influence of large companies, you legislate a higher minimum wage and more progressive corporate taxes. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing to have a policy preference for retaining the “character” that local retail businesses provide to a community, but my experience is that this kind of business is best supported when there’s a robust local economy with lots of choice and people have a bit of leisure income, rather than by having them artificially propped up over against the big-box retailer with lower prices and higher wages. The most vibrant local business scenes I’ve experienced are in walkable, dense, moderately expensive urban neighborhoods.

5795

Yes, absolutely.

5796

Small business might thrive in touristy towns that are all about being charming and having Shoppes and such. I suppose there are local ordinances at work in such places.

5797

You might be right, but without specific regulations against them, any business making good money is going to get bought by a larger company. For example, most of the tourist shops in beach towns that I go to are part of bigger chains now.

There’s just too much value in consolidation and scale.

5798

And it’s hard to compete with the exit strategy of getting bought out.

5799

Well, I think we could live without Air Jordans personally, but setting that aside, sure–not every industry would work like bookstores. The size of firms or the model of organization can be mutable as long as the principles are consistent:

  • Smaller is better.
  • Local impact should be maximized. (Hiring local, serving local customers, local supply chains)
  • Businesses properly serve the good of their community, not just their owners or investors.
  • Businesses that are too big or distributed to belong to a community become dysfunctional and promote vicious consumerism, worker exploitation, wealth disparity, and corruption.
  • It’s a legitimate use of government (municipal/state/federal) to disincentivize overly large or deracinated firms in favor of the small and local.

I believe that the kind of small locally owned businesses described above are less likely to mistreat workers, cause excess pollution and waste, or leave their communities high and dry than a big box store or distribution warehouse for a tech giant primarily because they are accountable to their community. But I agree with you Scott that it doesn’t make it impossible. However, the current state of things is no way to measure: global capitalism has had the smallest businesses on the ropes for decades. If you’re always on the precipice of insolvency, of course you will accept exceptions to expensive regulations or fight minimum wage laws. My thesis is that that’s exactly the wrong way to make things better for small businesses. The right way is 1) make it more expensive for huge businesses to operate, 2) give subsidies to small businesses, coupled with regulations as needed, to help them succeed by more positive measures rather than that race to the bottom.

So, yeah, a progressive corporate tax is good, but the critical distinction is that it’s not that big corporations owe more and should pay more. It’s that we don’t want big corporations to exist where local businesses can fill the need adequately. (And maybe anything that can’t be filled by local or regional businesses should be state-run or run non-profit? I don’t know.)

In theory this is a temporary move to correct for the mistakes of the last century, and when small businesses are thriving again because they don’t have to compete with ginormous corporations exploiting economies of scale (and exploiting workers), then the subsidies fade away and we just need protections to prevent them growing too big again.

The goal is to build a humane economy. I literally don’t think we can have that with Amazons and AT&Ts and, heck, Activision-Blizzards. We have to kill the Goliaths.

I recognize it’s all super speculative, ideologically uncategorizable, and almost certainly politically infeasible. But… I actually think it might be more feasible than we think, if there were politicians with guts enough to try something like it (hopefully better). Is it wilder than the New Deal at the time? I don’t know.

The idea is: Either don’t let them consolidate or don’t make it profitable for them. Big stick time.

5800

Yeah, for sure. You could have a local regulation that any business can’t have more than X storefronts in the country, for example. That would allow for local or regional expansion without allowing the big conglomerates to eat everyone up.

5801

Ok, so what would the actual implications be?

First, that sounds great for companies with a business model of running a few massive stores, say Walmart or Ikea. It means that they’ll just automatically avoid competition from anyone trying to get economies of scale by running a lot of small shops.

It also ends up artificially boosting the locations that are already the winners: if the limit is on the number of retail locations, there will be a huge opportunity cost in opening a store in any kind of marginal location. You want to spend your retail location “budget” on only the highest impact locations you can. Great for real estate owners in Manhattan. Not so great for the middle-tier cities.

If you instead put in the limits on e.g. revenue from retail locations or the number of retail employees, I guess what you’d end up with is incentivizing franchising models for retail instead.

5802

Wal-Mart has 4,743 stores in the US. That’s not a “few massive stores.” You could set the limit at 250 or something like that.

Ikea is different, they only have 52 stores.But in general, Ikea isn’t putting stores in touristy areas of tourist cities. They’re building them in the suburbs.

5803

I’m not sure if this is a hypothetical; I mean, I think there are ‘cute’ small towns out there which don’t have big box storefronts. At least the Berkshires (excepting towns like Pittsfield) or some kinda cutesey towns like Mill Valley or Solvang would probably qualify. I admit I’m just going off memory here, not hard data. I don’t know how they keep their quaint storefronts, whether the economics just somehow work out, or Big Retail hasn’t noticed them yet, or there are local laws that boost them. I’d have assumed the latter. Yes, I’m too lazy to do research at the moment.

If you’re a town that makes a lot of money off tourism, keeping the town ‘pretty’ in a particular way that impacts tourism would be an imperative, I’d think. That’s a special case; not every municipality can rely on dollars from rich New Yorkers/San Fransiscans etc.