"fetishize" is probably the wrong word, but people are certainly a lot more sympathetic towards small businesses. in my city, people are donating tens of thousands of dollars to local businesses that are closed due to coronavirus. can you imagine someone donating money to keep walmart afloat?

as an aside, I've read that jacobin article before and I find it to be a bit myopic. a large part of why small businesses offer comparatively shitty pay and benefits is because they can't really afford to do better. part of this is just inherent efficiencies of scale (generally a good thing), but it's also because the biggest players get to rewrite the rules to make it very difficult to compete with them. it's not unreasonable to think that a friendlier environment for small businesses might lead to better compensation for their employees.

That doesn't make the citizens ill-informed or delusional. The donators think the existence of small businesses provide a benefit to society beyond bottom lines. Small businesses always so close to sinking, so conditions will be worse for workers. Small business workers don't need to be in The Party though, and their social credit score won't come into play. One storm could sink every small business, leaving only big businesses to cover the entire market. Businesses that have gone unchecked for half a century and are big enough to keep legislation in regulatory capture.

That’s because companies like Walmart shouldn’t need those donations - bigger operations like them bring in much higher revenue. They also tend to work around tax laws and find loopholes, which a small business can’t do (and even if they did, it would be chump change compared to the behemoths). So it makes sense for the small guys to get that kind of “grassroots” support.

Revenue seems like a weird thing to look at though. If you only get more profit by hiring more employees, that doesn't change how much you can afford to pay your employees. How do they compare in terms of profit/employee?

Walmart doesn’t need donations if and will they would the people would have little say in that since they’ll get bailed out and the tax payer will pay for it one way or another.

Big business is also responsible for economies of scale. A small mom and pop shop can't really scale the same way a big business does. Another added benefit is that we get to regulate the products much more without swamping the business in costs they can't afford.

So I'm not sure that big business is really "responsible for irresponsible economics that hurts everyone".

Publicly traded companies are profit maximizing machines. Societal wealth has never been higher but the middle class is shrinking. It shouldn't be a surprise, then, when people can't afford to live in their own society. We're facing the natural progression of a society ruled by greed machines: economic depression.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2016/04/11/is-big-...

This article was from the Jacobin, perhaps the foremost Left-wing publication in the USA presently. Jacobin is essentially the Pravda in English.

tl;dr:

critiques of small business aim to reject the following dilemma as false,

> The alternative [to monopolists and global megacorporations]? Small business.

rather than to promote big business.

In the USA, the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls any business with 500 employees or fewer a ‘small business’, and it's usually something like that which gets translated into policy. Not all that small, imo.

But absolutely people valorize small businesses in a way that elides the fact that what makes businesses exploitative is (contra this former Amazon VP) inherent in wage relations, and smaller employers are still operating under those relations. Because small businesses are romanticized and valorized as they are in their culture, the language of ‘promoting small businesses’ is often used to give cover for massive corporate giveaways on the part of the government. These are [common](https://inthesetimes.com/article/22412/outrageous-corporate-...) [lines](https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/07/can-business-of-any-s...) of [socialist (this piece has some of the exact language of the grandparent poster)](https://jacobinmag.com/2018/01/small-businesses-workers-wage...) [critique (see Morales on free trade here)](https://inthesetimes.com/article/22412/outrageous-corporate-...).

Generally, calls to treat ‘small business’ with greater scrutiny come from an anti-capitalist (or at least ‘capitalism-critical’, if you will) perspective, and are not motivated by some belief that monopolies or anti-competitive cabals are actually preferable to larger numbers of smaller, weaker, relatively competitive corporations. But there's a sense that the critique should go deeper than ‘big business bad, small business good’— which imo is pretty commonly distilled in a lot of mainstream political rhetoric— and raise questions of worker ownership, decommodification (e.g., of healthcare), the role of public enterprises, etc.

Advising skepticism toward the valor of small businesses also doesn't negate the fact that promoting small business _can_ be [beneficial or strategic for society as a whole](https://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/22385/coronavirus-wor...) in particular circumstances! But I sympathize with the grandparent poster's general sentiment; I feel like on the whole it's called for.