Your claim is trivially falsified. There are literally hundreds of small restaurants and retail stores within a few miles of me that are run by small businesses or individual proprietors. The barriers are more in high rents than in regulatory compliance.

The bread example seems pretty bad too. There are tons of local bakeries that take more of an artisanal spin on things in my neck of the woods, and I bet all over the US. They'd have to be niche because it's not like they're going to compete with a national brand that has automated factories that crank bread out. That's who a corner store in the US is going to buy from.

But the point is that you can compete against these national brands, quite trivially. I wasn't exaggerating on the cost. You can make a loaf of bread literally for pennies. And it's better in every single way than what you buy in the store besides the fact that it will tend to go stale within a few days if not refrigerated. But even that's arguably a benefit as well. It goes stale because it's not jam full of chemical preservatives.

It's only when you start making all sorts of things for yourself that you really start to see how completely irrational the markup on many things is, which then begs the question - why isn't anybody simply dropping the prices by 50% and making a killing? And the only answer I can really see is because it's become really quite painful to be able to sell things in America, unless you want to go all-in on it.

I'd also add that in terms of food safety, the big concern is not small business, but big business. Buy food from an individual or a family and you're eating what they're also eating for dinner, and probably have been for decades. By contrast at e.g. McDonalds, those executives probably aren't touching their "product" except for photo ops. Their only motivation is to maximize profit, which often comes in the form of sacrifices in quality or even safety of what's sold. [1] And this has always been true. "The Jungle" wasn't about Joe Bob's streetside shop.

[1] - https://www.meatpoultry.com/articles/20650-lftb-to-be-classi...

At my corner store, you can buy a taco wrapped in foil that was clearly made by some local next to a crack pipe and milligram scales. The bread is Mrs. Baird's or some other national brand. If you think that strict regulation is what created this state of things, then you may want to re-evaluate that.

The answer that you see is just totally wrong and ignorant. Instead of making a fool of yourself here perhaps go talk to an actual commercial baker. Ask them how much they spend on licensing and regulatory compliance versus other costs like rent, labor, insurance, utilities, machinery, etc.

Sure if you bake a few loaves of bread at home then that probably seems cheap in terms of ingredients. Now add in your labor, allocate costs for utilities and kitchen appliances, and figure out what it would cost to drive around all day delivering that bread to retailers. Suddenly it's not so cheap.

The false dichotomy you're assuming is precisely the problem I'm talking about. There's a huge range of production between 0 and industrial scale commercial baker. At least there can and should be. But this false dichotomy isn't really so false in America, precisely because of our systems. Go to most of any (and to my knowledge literally any) "developing" country, and you'll see everything I've described here, and it's awesome! The effects on prices, independence, society, 'neighborliness', and more just have such great knock-on effects.