When a deli closes up shop because they can't afford to hire people - it isn't for lack of customers interested in food. Food is a basic necessity that people will consume in as many varied forms as budget and tastes allow.

The notion that a deli would simply close up shop because they couldn't hire people at a wage they deemed reasonable means they either couldn't be bothered to try higher prices/quality - or for some reason they are unable to (e.g. high debt service costs). The building sitting empty and idle costs the business money, so it's surprising they don't at least try something.

Around here, 16” cheese pizzas have gone from “around $10” just 8 months ago to “around $15”.

Pizza places that would be jammed from 6 to 8 PM with a line for pickup are now ghost towns. The one I was in last night at 8:15, workers outnumbered customers (dine-in plus pickup).

The roast beef place that I’d frequent on a particular errand went from $6.50 for a large roast beef to $9.50. What used to be a 15-deep line at lunch is now “walk straight to the register and order”.

Customers are only willing to pay so much for food. That well isn’t infinitely deep. (Maybe some of the gap is COVID, but people are out doing plenty of other things, other restaurants seem to be doing well, and these places were jammed during the pickup-only phases of COVID, so I think pricing is a significant driver of reduced volume.)

Anecdotally this is me. I work from home 3 days a week, 2 days in office. Pre-pandemic I ate breakfast, lunch, and sometimes dinner in the road...2.5 hour commute. Food prices have increased 10-40% at each one of those stops. Now I eat one lunch per week out to socialize. The other 5 meals that I used to eat out are groceries I buy at the store and carry in.

The reason I was at this second-choice (also virtually abandoned) pizza place last night was that our normal/preferred pizza place had jacked up their prices so much. This one had done the same, which ensured that parking was plentiful right in front of the joint, but also meant that the owner was forlornly leaning on the empty parking meter rather than being needed inside selling pizzas.

I suspect I'll now mostly eat out when the company is keeping me on the road (and paying for it), but will overall eat a lot more at home now.

Probably healthier anyway, but this can't be good for restaurant owners and workers.

> Food is a basic necessity that people will consume in as many varied forms as budget and tastes allow.

Food has supply and demand like anything else. People have to eat, but they don't have to eat at the delhi.

For example, if they charged $50 a sandwich it would probably not work. Maybe the business owner is just being stupid, but its also not impossible that they ran the numbers and they just didn't add up. That happens sometimes in business. I havent seen their books, i dont know what the numbers on their business look like.

The most import parts don't cost money. Fixed schedules, non-punitive work rules, flexibility, treating your employees like they have value. The shift in culture began when we went from having a "personnel department" to "Human Resources" - resources are something you often extract and use up, to the point we have a special way to call out resources that are renewable.

Businesses might ask customers to pay more. They might instead pay CEOs and investors less.

Automation is coming regardless.

Most businesses are small businesses, not ones run by mega millionaire CEOs.

In terms of registrations, sure, but what about surface area? I can only think of very small pockets of places where the heavy majority of establishments are part of some megacorp

The suburbs are especially bad....

In a lot of small business it are the land lords who get the best deal by a huge margin.

but where do most people actually work?

Still small businesses.

JP Morgan Chase don't agree with you in 2014:

"48 percent of all US employees work for small businesses, down from 52 percent in the early 2000s."

https://www.jpmorganchase.com/institute/research/small-busin...

The NYSSCPA didn't agree with you in 2017 either:

"Since 2014, the latest year for which there is census data, this is no longer the case. At this point, 39.2 percent were employed at either a large or very large company, while 26.5 percent worked at mid-sized companies and 34.3 percent worked at small companies."

https://www.nysscpa.org/news/publications/the-trusted-profes...

Atkinson & Lind ("Big is Beautiful") didn't agree with you in 2019 either, specifically taking on what they call the "myth of small business as the engine of job creation"

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/small-business-job-creati...

The Small Business Administration didn't agree with you in 2020:

"According to small business statistics from SBA, small businesses make 99.9% of US businesses and employ 47.1% of US employees."

https://smallbiztrends.com/small-business-statistics

A business is not a business if it’s only profitable on exploitation.

A business is a business if it has customers. It only stops being a business if it loses those customers or it's no longer profitable. Whole Foods was one of the 1st grocery retailers to treat their workers better, yet at the same time many people nicknamed the store as "Whole Paycheck". What customers are willing to pay for or more importantly what they are able to pay for is also an important part of the conversation.