Care to clarify?
They were not. They were pointing out that a single-man operation has far less power to dictate market conditions than a 50,000 person conglomerate. Even when they are the only butcher in a whole village, they have nowhere near the price-setting power that a company does (even one that doesn't have the same level of monopoly).
Much of what Smith argues about is power, beginning with among the shortest, pithiest, and clearest sentences in the entire book:
"Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power."
Then there is his very long diatribe against joint stock (privately-held, shareholder-based) corporations, which Smith argues should be limited largely to the financial sector (banks and insurance). Itself an interesting distinction and one that's had me think about those areas of economic activity, and why the so-called "FIRE" sector (finance, insurance, and real estate) are linked together.
One interpretation I've arrived at is that all concern the evaluation of future value over a given portfolio: of loans, of insurance policies, and of mortgages (themselves a class of loans). These all ... have some peculiar and similar behavioural characteristics, risks, and moral and morale hazards associated with them. They also tend toward monopolistic in both scale and practices. Among the notable exceptions to anti-trust regulations against conspiring on prices is the exception for insurance underwriting boards, comprised of multiple companies, who share risk, cost, and pricing data to set premiums.
The first is limited liability to stockholders, whose losses are capped at the value of their investment and not for their full personal assets. That is, if you purchase stock in a company, neither creditors nor plaintiffs may seek compensation above and beyond what's already been invested. This is what is meant in the term "limited liability company", though the protection includes firms not described by that specific term. The protection does not apply to sole proprieterships and simple partnerships, so far as I understand (US law).
<https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/limitedliability.asp>
The second is the so-called "corporate veil", which further protects specific officers and board members of a firm from personal liability for the firm's actions in many cases. A recent notable (and notorious) example of this has been of Perdue Pharma and the Sackler Family, in which the officers (of Perdue) and the shareholders (the Sacklers) escaped most civil and any criminal liability for the deaths of 500,000 slewn for profits via the company's unwarranted and addictive opioid products.
<https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/piercing_the_corporate_veil>
<https://www.npr.org/2021/09/01/1031053251/sackler-family-imm...>
There is no corporate protection, large or small, for shifts in overall economic conditions, particularly as affects individual workers (as opposed to officers, board members, creditors, and/or investors). Though of course, large corporate interests do have much greater influence over both government policy and legislation, and often secure bailouts ... which seem rarely to reach individual front-line workers.
ProPublica has a list compiled in 2008 extending from the Penn Central Railroad (1970, $3.2 billion) to the Troubled Asset Relief Program (2008, $700 billion), Citigroup (2008, $280 billion), and Bank of America (2009, $142 billion).
<https://www.propublica.org/article/government-bailouts>
I'd strongly recommend you respond to what's actually been said by those you're responding to, and based on factual and relevant information. It makes for a more interesting discussion, even where, or rather, especially where, there is disagreement.
You mean those people? Because I just want to make sure we know who we're referring to here.
Why are you so easily fooled by the facelessness and lack of intimacy of the large company that you lose all sense on the matter? If people stopped buying meat today, the single man operations would go bankrupt in very much the same manner the 50,000 man operations would - in the latter case, however, 50,000 people just lost their income and ceased to pay taxes instead of the one man.