Bitcoin is not meant to be used for small transactions. Bitcoin can scale indefinitely in terms of dollar value of daily transactions but it is limited when it comes to number of transactions.

I don't think that the lightning network will offer a solution. In engineering, problems are always better solved at the root. As clever as it might be, the lightning network is a bandaid patch on top of a suboptimal solution... There are many cryptocurrencies that scale better than Bitcoin in terms of number of transactions.