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Comment by olivermarks | Hacker News Reader

centralizing delivery. It's no longer cost effective to go to a store, look for a product, pay for it and return home when it is cheaper to have it delivered at a specific time and day in both time and money. Small specialized businesses can't compete with this to charge the margin they need for rent and overheads. This is putting lot of shops out of business, redundancies etc

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Why should we care if they go out of business? If they shutdown and bow out won’t newer, useful businesses pop up in their place? I see no reason to treat a small shop like an endangered species that must be preserved. Preserved for what? Most people won’t go there anymore.

Example: There was a fairly large Mom and a Pop retail store here that shutdown once Walmart moved in. What opened in its place? A massive rock climbing facility with 40 foot walls. It has enriched the community and given people something to do other than just roaming aisles looking for crap to buy and not talk to each other.

The general sentiment is that small businesses are owned and operated by our neighbors. Part of a healthy society is having a group of people with diverse backgrounds, interests, and jobs all living together.

Amazon's march towards a global monopoly is partially responsible for homogenizing our society.

It is interesting, because a extremely large percentage of these small businesses that are failing are immigrant minority owned.[1] So in many ways keeping small businesses around does make things 'diverse' but it also leads to a much bigger problem. This massive amount of immigration that was meant to help keep the economy running is now failing to keep their businesses going, and falling into high rates of unemployment or underemployment. Does it really serve our economy to have a bunch of immigrants whose main mode of economic activity is starting small businesses that are not very viable, and hiring all their relatives?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/opinion/sunday/immigrants...

The essential economic problem is that currently running small retail businesses isn't viable unless you sell through Amazon's distribution (also less centralized ebay). This means far fewer retail jobs, empty storefronts and malls, taxes levied on businesses, gasoline/petrol etc The centralizing of everything through Amazon is classic monopoly practice. I have a ladder being delivered by them today I ordered on Friday evening. No one can compete on price or efficiencies both on their side and from my perspective. I don't want to drive my truck to buy a ladder. Nothing is stopping this trend form rapidly increasing across the western world

The problem isn't that you want to preserve an inefficient business model. A company with a monopoly like the one Amazon has, can afford to take small businesses out of the market by operating at a loss. Once the small businesses are out of the market, they can increase prices possibly above the original price level the small businesses used to offer. Without competition, smaller incumbents won't succeed. Monopolies stifle innovation. New incumbents won't have a chance.

>> If they shutdown and bow out won’t newer, useful businesses pop up in their place?

No. We have Kmart's our town that have been empty for nearly 15 years. With the way commercial properties are taxed, the ownesr just let them sit vacant

Kmart is a small mom+pop store now?

In this specific example it doesn't matter if it's Kmart or a one off mom and pop store. You can look at NYC to see how empty store fronts are given preference over renting to new non-giant brands. Landlords have figured out it's better to just let a storefront sit empty for years rather than rent to anyone that isn't an already giant/established brand.

The Collin Creek mall in Plano, TX has been its way out for a decade, only anchor left is Sears. Most of the internal stores were replaced with Asian massage parlors, not sure that is the useful new businesses you had in mind. Oh yeah, enough seniors power-walking their laps around the interior to power the matrix twice over.

But I don’t blame Amazon, a lot of the department stores have been poorly managed for decades, and they are so bad off now that nobody with a fresh perspective wants to touch them. I think Sears blew it all on canceling their credit cards for inactivity every thirty days then issuing new ones next time you went into the store ;)

Collin Creek is utterly bizarre to walk through. it seemed like 80% of the shops were shuttered, and I saw maybe a dozen other customers while walking the length of the mall. One of the 15,000+ sqft units was leased out to a model railroad club that used the space for one evening a week.

I don't know how they're even making enough to keep the lights on.

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