People on the right often claim to be for the free market and for small, decentralized government, but then turn around and love big, centrally planned conglomerates,just as long as they are owned by share-holders and are ruled with an authoritarian hand.
You underestimate, vastly, just what they've done to their supply chain, distribution network and logistics to make it that efficient and therefore cheap for their customers. It's part of the reason people switched from buying from local shops and went to them instead.
I chose them as an example because business people know a lot about what they did and the general public doesn't have a clue. I don't even like Wal-Mart, but I'm also aware of some of the reasons they're so successful. They're literally studied by people who study supply chain management because of what they did, e.g. -
https://www.skubana.com/walmart-leading-way/
I used them because it's fashionable to hate them, but anyone who knew what they had actually built that's not visible to the public would know that it's not something that you can just replace that easily. So that lets me separate the replies according to how informed they are.
Finally, your attempt to connect large companies to "central planning" is at odds with the fact that one works and the other does not. Central planning doesn't work because different people have different needs and no single plan can accommodate so many unique individuals. I don't think you will find many businesses that aren't planned, but they're not managing so many unique needs, either. And in those times when they really do end up in a situation like that, they end up being spun off as separate companies for that very reason.
Eventually, the small stores join up together to bargain for a wholesale price lower than market price to their suppliers, and thus earn a higher margin.
ala, what you see at walmart today.
They have the massive capital to build a megamart anywhere they want, and have it run at a loss for however long it takes to drive everyone out of business. This absolutely kills local businesses and funnels money out of the area, leaving only the low wages paid to the local Walmart staff. And because it's Walmart job or no job, people have no bargaining power.
When small businesses form cooperatives for collective bargaining, they keep ownership local, they keep jobs local, and they keep the stores in the city centres running, which is better for pedestrian and public transit access, not to mention cafe life and local bars/eateries. Compare this to a megamart outside the city where you have no choice but to drive there. You get everything there and have no real reason to go into the city. As a consequence, city life dies out.
Coops and associations work with the local shop owners and communities, whereas megacorps trample and replace them with cookie cutter faceless megamarts.
And no, I don't think the supply chains are actually more robust for local stores. I've had better luck at the local Wal-Mart than at other stores for TP and other hard-to-get items. If anything, early on, some people weren't checking the smaller stores, but after they got wiped out, they've yet to recover and yet Wal-Mart has.
There are still supply chain issues, don't get me wrong, but mostly they're upstream a bit from the customers. Think of things like meat packing plants having trouble finding any way to operate safely or having a lot of production that had to shift from commercial packaging to retail packaging and distribution.
Walmart is so big that it utterly dominates the market, to the detriment of everyone else. But because they're able to sell everything at the lowest price, people go there. It's impossible to compete with Walmart.
It's a clear example of why the invisible hand of the free market is a dangerous myth.
Economy of scale is not at all the same as monopoly power and conflating the two only makes your point more confused.
Finally, the "invisible hand" is really just a survival of the fittest type effect. It's every bit as random and imperfect as that is in nature, but the effects are no less real, or we'd all be peasants living at 1800s level standards instead of typing to each other on a globe-spanning computer network.
If anything, I'd say that Socialism is the dangerous myth. Always promising utopia, as if you can create a utopia with unconstrained mass murder from a Socialist revolution. If we were the right kind of people to live in that utopia, we'd be sharing our stuff willingly right now, not seeing talk of guillotines and forcibly taking stuff, as can be observed in this very story. The proper way to get closer to that would be to encourage people to share and be generous.
As the song says, first it was a tragedy, now it's a farce: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwqnRYPcrl0
They can afford to this due to their enormous size and domination of their suppliers, which means they can sell their wares at lower prices than anyone else. They can afford to bleed money for as long as they have to, in order to win in an area.
That is almost the textbook definition of a local monopoly, facilitated by sheer size and entrenched market position on a larger scale. They are so large that they can have everything in all of their stores, they don't have to worry too much about certain items not being profitable in certain areas, because they're big enough to carry everything everywhere, unlike smaller local stores, who cannot afford the space nor the losses.
Walmart banks hard on the convenience of everything being available in the same store, which is something they can only do because of their sheer clout and economies of scale that only work for really big powerful companies.
The end effect is that Walmat (and other similarly huge chains) drive smaller businesses out of the market, because a free market always rewards those who dominate others, and rewards domination by affording even better tools and methods for dominating competitors. It's a surefire way to make sure the market is owned and run by just a small handful of very large and powerful entities.
A truly free market is one that is sensibly regulated, in order to foster competition and prevent monopolies from taking over, according to Adam Smith, not one that is completely unregulated, as many free market proponents seem to argue for.
So it's not a monopoly at all, they just offer things at cheaper prices and drive more expensive businesses out of business, while many reasonably efficient competitors still exist.
As a consequence of this, local businesses die, jobs are lost and people either have to move away or accept Walmart jobs with well-documented bad pay and bad working conditions.
All of this is a deliberate business strategy by Walmart, because the US political climate and "business-friendly" ideology from both major parties prioritizes giant corporations with enormous lobbying power, over small business owners.
As a further local effect, business life is driven from the city centers to outside the cities, causing fewer people from the suburbs to go into the city centers, leading to urban neglect and decay.
They don't have control over the supply of any particular good, it's not like an ISP where they have covenants with local governments that limit competition, they're not Standard Oil. They're not even at the level of Microsoft, because there's not much they can do to exclude competition.
But I guess some people have tried this tact, before. Here's an article which discusses many of the points you've made and explains why they don't make sense:
https://truthonthemarket.com/2006/07/10/the-unconvincing-ant...
Honestly it seems you either refuse to read what I wrote, or you are invested in a free market ideology. The link you posted is nothing more than a hard-libertarian free market fanatic opinion blog, heavy on snark and lacking in value.
Read about the damage Walmart does to communities and why even their mere presence in the market completely distorts it:
https://money.com/walmart-stores-closing-small-towns/
https://www.citylab.com/life/2012/09/radiating-death-how-wal...
https://popularresistance.org/new-report-wal-mart-destroys-l...
https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2013/03/28/1197622/-The-Walma...
This goes for all megamart chains, Amazon and the like, but Walmart is among the very worst.
That's why I don't see what good "dismantling" them does. Say someone offs Google tomorrow. The website dies and we're left with a bunch of people who have no job and some servers and buildings and whatnot that are less useful to anyone than when you started.
To the extent that consumers do have a choice, that is somewhat true, but the examples of Facebook and Amazon are as much incredible luck of being in the right place and the right time, exponential explosion of brand new modes of communication and commerce, and all kinds of unintended consequences. Again, to say the middle class "signed up" for this is hardly the case.
At the very least there are issues of power and information imbalances. Take the example of someone comparing the price of something at Amazon and the same thing at a local bookstore and deciding that it's worth the $0.50 savings to go with Amazon. It is easy -- and incorrect -- to say, "well, they signed up for the massive corporate supply chain consolidation and the dissolution of many local economies' autonomy that transactions like this will precipitate when performed at a large scale."
The average consumer simply doesn't have the access to data that corporate boards and politicians do, nor do they have the historical and statistical training to make an educated analysis of their implications.
Finally, even though there are people and organizations who urge alternative consumer patterns, the reach and the volume of their message pales in comparison to the marketing, PR and advertising armies employed by large corporations and their political allies.
The average consumer doesnt need to be given a bachelor's degree in economics to make a choice on making a company bigger or smaller with their purchase. I know people who support smaller business and it is independent of education.
Amazons offer to the end consumer, is not a hard sell. Theres no drug dealing physical addiction, nobody wakes up with a horses head in their bed and no guns held to people's head. The offer is buy an item that costs money. That's it.
People sign up. They want 0.50c cheaper with overnight delivery. The people see the benefit and convience of internet shopping and choose it. Small businesses failing to keep up and relying on thinking of the population as dumb and unlucky to force redistribution of wealth are not helping their own case.
Many small businesses have succeeded massively off the same medium amazon is using, the internet and it's not 'luck'.
They're not owed in a fully capitalist system, but I can see some merit for the idea that inequality has gotten so bad that there needs to be external intervention to fix that, and redistribute the wealth that is currently concentrated in the top 1%. Giving normal people that money would be a good thing for the economy, and I can see some benefit to it.
Now of course in practice it wouldn't be legal and getting that money from them would be near impossible, but its interesting in theory.
The rich are the first to encourage a witch-hunt against the rich. It drives up business.
What are they going to do if they dismantle, say, Wal-Mart? Now all the people who worked there have no jobs and the people who shopped there have one less source of goods. Sure, we might be fine without it due to the alternatives, but once you go down that road, you find out that you've ripped up a complex system of logistics that moved goods to places that people wanted them and that you don't have any sort of replacement planned.
But that's usually what happens in these revolutions, they rip everything apart and then try to replace it with something better and fail. But next time will always be better, right?