Why do you even visit them? I’d say if you use them for product discovery but then give all your sales to online merchants, you are an absolute enemy of small businesses, whatever you think you feel about them.
Comment on Who shops at small businesses?
Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
I prefer to support small businesses, but anytime I visit any in my area, they generally offer similar or the exact same products that I can order online at a much higher markup.
I’m struggling enough right now, and every dollar counts. I’m rooting for the little guys, but I’m not willing to go broke to save them.
scarabic@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Oh look, there’s a new store. Let’s see what they’re about. Oh damn, I can’t afford to pay that much for that.
Carnelian@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
You just gotta be careful. Megacorps will drop prices to take advantage of the exact logic you’ve laid out. On an individual day you’re gonna save money on an individual purchase with them, sure.
But once the local place goes out of business, suddenly there isn’t anyone for them to undercut, so the prices creep back up.
Then you’re in the exact same situation as before, usually a bit worse. Except, before, the money you spent at the local business would mostly recirculate within your actual community. Now it’s being siphoned off into some yacht measuring contest. Local wages go down because people need to take jobs at the big companies, which then reinforces the “every dollar counts” problem, making it ever harder for your community to reverse course.
This gets worse and worse until the corpos eventually abandon your community. So you used to have a local grocer, then corpo drives them out of business, then corpo shutters the location for poor performance. Now you live in a food desert
The dream of all vampires is to keep you barely alive enough to be fed on. They go to extreme lengths to control the narrative around this so instead of seeing vampires actively trying to enthrall us we see them more as a friendly, convenient way to help make ends meet. But convincing us that shopping local is a burdensome act of charity is their first line of attack