Small Businesses Are Dying by the Thousands – and No One Is Tracking the Carnage
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Guess who will grab more market share post-COVID? Better yet, guess who wasn't affected by forced lockdowns and benefited during the worst of COVID?
I find it very distressing that this massive transfer of wealth from small businesses to megacorps isn't being discussed more.
this also manifests in evolution where all but a finitely many mutants survive a catastrophic change in the environment and the rest perish.
People are also not always very good judges of long-term value. For the longest time the response I'd get whenever I expressed some sentiment of supporting small business, all things being equal, was something along the lines of "well you should support whoever can deliver the good at the lowest price." Although that's true to some extent, in the long term it leads to personal costs as local services are gone, and there's less and less competition. Short-term benefits, long term costs and so forth.
In general, I think there's far too little focus on maintaining healthy competition. The pendulum in public discussions often swings from public to private services and employment, which is a good conversation to have, but there's almost never a serious, critical discussion about increasing competition and what those barriers are. US society is full of things that stifle competition and they don't get 1/10 the attention they deserve. It seems as if when it's brought up, you're forced into these ultra-libertarian or anti-capitalist stereotypes.
The other day I was looking for a cycle restoration shop. There's a great one and they should be thriving right now. But their business was destroyed in riots. Not the business owner's fault. You could make an argument that it's just one more downstream effect of a racist cop killing someone over a counterfeit bill, a very significant one. This effect has played out many many times across the country now I'm sure. But who will foot the bill? The Mpls police dept?
It seems we used to have this intuitive understanding of "bad things happen to good people" and "the community should pitch in collectively to support these things" but it's fading away.
The darwinian model is flawed, unless you're focuses solely on the net benefits to those who benefit, which is circular in its reasoning.
Yet over that half a century the standard of living in the US has vastly increased, so much that the US poverty line is in the top quintile of world incomes.
US Median household wealth adjusted for household size changes and inflation has increased 50%. That's a massive increase [1].
The middle class has shrunk; because more moved up and above it than went below it. The share of US households, again adjusted for proper effects, making over 100K has tripled since 1967 [2].
Not many first world countries saw this kind of growth for the people you claim are being destroyed.
Care to point out which metric you are using to claim the core of this country is being destroyed? It's certainly not income.
[1] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-...
[2] https://www.cato.org/blog/middle-class-shrinking-households-...
US households have changed dramatically since 1967. There's participation of women in the workforce (up about 20% https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/05/art2full.pdf), housing prices have gone up about (~800% https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/) - home ownership being the hallmark of the middle class, and the wages of the middle class have increased about 300% although that's 1000% more than the average personal income. Once you obtain a home, you can springboard (in a generation or 5) into the wealthy class. Even at that rate, you're the poor elite making a measly $1m a year without working.
The parasitic elite (in the US) have CRUSHED the working class by ensuring that entering the middle class is as difficult as possible, while the middle class have largely used property to boost themselves into their own generational wealth. The inflation has been due to US debt, which comes from Military spending, QE, etc. The public market has been dominated by large brands who have a slew of predatory practices (looking at you JPM Chase, Apple, Bank of America, etc). NIMBY policies (by the newly elevated middle class, clutching their pearls) and work centralization in dense urban settings, has hurt the whole situation...but there's hope with Covid, ironically. That's what I believe based on my own observation (and experience).
People claim this a lot, but for a half dozen datasets I've looked at over the years, the opposite is true.
To prove this claim, make some definition of rich (income, wealth, top N, whatever), and see how many people in that class stay there. You'll find that most rich do not stay in the level of wealth you picked very long.
A simple place to check is Forbes 400. The top 400 churns a lot. The next place is places like FRED data on mobility, where it's clear over the span of 10 years most of those in the top decile are no longer there, and those in the bottom are no longer there.
Another place to look is how many millionaires in the US are first generation - last I checked it;s about 90% of them.
So, for what reasonable metric of wealth can you demonstrate those people in that group stay there for a decade, or a generation? My experience is that your claim is made by people that believe it but have never measured it. Over the years I've ran across a few datasets for which it can be properly evaluated, and in each case, and for each definition of rich that could be answered by the datatset, the same pattern emerges: the people in the rich group get poorer and the people in the poor group get richer. Reversion to the mean is a much more powerful force than the ability to hoard wealth.
>US households have changed dramatically since 1967
Yes; both places I linked made adjustments for such things, as I mentioned. Go ahead and read their methodology before arguing strawmen.
>housing prices have gone up about (~800% https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/)
From your link, inflation adjusted price was 162,915.87 for 1970 and was 271,768.42 for 2020, only a 67% increase. Why would you criticize my numbers above, which were inflation adjusted, then try to pull such a dishonest stunt as using the non-inflation adjusted prices, when they're right there?
Over the same time, median house sizes have gone up nearly 200% from 1970 [1]. And they've gotten vastly safer, more energy efficient, and better in just about every possible way.
So, given the inflation adjusted housing value and size, again things have gotten better, not worse, despite you trying to spin it so dishonestly.
>home ownership being the hallmark of the middle class
Home ownership Q1 1970 64.3%. Q2 2020 is 67.9% [2] First and second moment going upwards as well. Again not the direction you're claiming.
>Once you obtain a home, you can springboard (in a generation or 5) into the wealthy class
Income mobility in the US has not changed much in 50+ years as measured by investigating ALL IRS records [3]. FRED single generation income and wealth mobility [4] show that more than half of the bottom 20% move up and more than half of the top 20% move down in one generation. Doing a simple markov walk with the values they give shows nearly complete mixing in 3 generations.
>by ensuring that entering the middle class is as difficult as possible,
More than half of the poor do it every generation [4].
>The inflation has been due to US debt,
Never had an econ course?
>looking at you JPM Chase, Apple, Bank of America, etc
The biggest three banks in the US have around 10% market share each, the 4th has < 5% market share, and they fall quickly after that. There's around 8000 different banks you can use in the US. These banks are not the size or massive control you imply they are.
>That's what I believe based on my own observation (and experience)
Using one's own experience and observation to make claims about complex issues like this is terribly and ridiculously incorrect, subject to ignorance, selection bias, and a host of other personal issues. That's why studying econ and reading proper data sources before making all the claims you are is very important if you want an accurate view of what is actually happening, instead of what one or another echo chamber has fed you.
[1] https://www.newser.com/story/225645/average-size-of-us-homes...
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
[3] https://www.cfr.org/blog/new-harvard-study-us-social-mobilit...
[4] https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/j...
See pg10 for 40% net worth figure: https://www.nber.org/papers/w24085.pdf
The math is simple. "Rich value" / "poor value", if you can make "poor value" shrink even a little, causes the expression to blow up. This is his game.
Every single time I've chased down the source of claims like these, they go back to this person, which is why I know his name and his shell game.
Aha - scanning through his paper, there it is on page 6: "I also use a more restricted concept of wealth, which I call “financial resources” or FR. This is defined as net worth minus net equity in owner-occupied housing (the primary residence only)." He does this in each and every paper for decades now.
His usual trick, done by pretty much no one else, to make the values more outrageous. Go read some other economists.
As to wealth owned, it's nearly irrelevant to the average person if the top found companies and own incredible value in stock, since that value was not seized from the average person, and without the company, the average person would not be given that money. It's stock assets - completely made up as the value of a company.
When Zuckerberg files an IPO and sells, say, 50% of Facebook and keeps 50%, if some buyer pays 1B for 1%, that makes FB worth 100 * 1B = 100B. Zuck just made 50 billion. If tomorrow during trading FB drops to 100K for 1%, then Zuck just lost around 50B. This money which is his wealth did not come from people when the price climbs just like it does not suddenly go back when the price drops.
Now look at the Forbes 400 - majority of them first gen, their wealth is in stock in a company they founded, and the rest are almost exclusively 2nd gen with stock in a company their parents founded. The value of the company is a measure of how much their customers value them. These people are rich by owning something that people highly value. That is it.
So it seems like petty jealously to worry about wealth in stock funny money, since it wasn't taken from you.
And the evidence is that the US enjoys amoung the highest, if not the highest, amount of disposable income for any country on the planet. Our poor are rich by world standards.
>if the poor weren't struggling to survive
Here's what the poor own: [2] A lot of it is the reasons I posted in another answer in this thread: poverty includes college and grad students (not yet earning) and retired (well to do, low income since retired). This makes up a lot of those listed by Census as in poverty.
The poor in the US are not poor by any other country, and after tax transfers, are bringing in pretty good money.
>12% of all Americans are below the poverty line, which for a single person is less than 12k USD a year.
For the US, poverty line is defined as (usually) 1/3 median income, so as all people get richer, so does the poverty line. For example, that line puts a person in poverty in the US at about to 85th percentile for world income.
These incomes also are pre-tax transfer: they don't include values given via tax and welfare systems. The US spends around $60K per person in poverty on welfare programs. Last I could find numbers this averaged like $40K in transfers to a poor family per year.
Also this line includes students, grad students, both classes have not yet earned, but will. It also includes old retired people that can have millions in assets, but no income, so now they're below the income poverty line. Both of these groups make up a big part of that 12%.
Also it's a static snapshot - people ten to accumulate wealth as they age [1]. Median wealth for under 35 is $11K. For 65 and up it's over $200k. So a lot of those poor young people make some decent money, and eventually retire back to the poverty line, but with wealth amassed.
For example, Turkey median income is ~$4000 USD in PPP equivalent. But they're not all dying from hunger.
[1] https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/finance/average-net-worth...
[2] https://www.heritage.org/poverty-and-inequality/report/air-c...
Enough to know that most all of his claims are always at the outer bounds of research. He is an outlier, and nearly every time someone cites some inequality quote that is supposed to make it seem outrageous, the source is Wolff. As such, I rarely dig through every sentence of his papers, since when I do, and compare them to the outstanding literature, I find at every turn his calculations are done to maximize inequality. No other researcher I've seen in this field obtain his claims.
Here [1] for example is another source that replaces Wolff's 46% with 39%. Here's the Minneapolis Fed with [2] the same value under 40% (and they make the interesting point that even with the 1% completely removed, that the next 9 % still has a large amount - so do we torch them next after the 1% is handled?)
There are ample others even lower.
To paraphrase you, "it seems you're not well versed in the research in this field." If you were, you'd not cite Wolff as evidence.
I'll leave it to you to discover why Wolff is an outlier.
You may as well quote the rare atmospheric scientist that claims there is no global warming or Dr. Wakefield on vaccines causing autism if you're this willing to believe things that suit your agenda without looking at the broader field.
[1] https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide...
[2] https://www.minneapolisfed.org/institute/working-papers-inst...
First, there's no reason wages should track productivity. If the reason for productivity was capital investments for equipment (computers, machines, etc), then the return for labor makes little sense. Those gains should and would return to capital since that was the source of the gains.
Next, incomes are not the proper measure of benefit. What you should track is called total remuneration which includes benefits and cost to employ, which BLS tracks, and which have tracked much closer than the pop graph.
Also, most of those graphs I have seen use a different deflator for income versus productivity. When this is fixed, they again are much closer. If you link such a graph with proper sources I can show you.
Here's a post working through some of these issues for a commonly posted graph [1]. There's also papers at NBER claiming the pop graphs are wrong for similar reasons.
>Having incomes flat line for the middle class for the last 40 years is not a good sign.
Why not? Given that that it is not flat for women or minorities over that period, and there was increased global competition, automation and computers replacing lots of old jobs, I think it's great that wages haven't dropped overall.
It also hides that there have been incredible benefits given to workers that are not in wages. You need to look at BLS cost to employ as the metric. Starting around 1970 all sorts of federal regulation has been passed making workers safer and shifting a lot of benefits to employers.
Also median wage hides the fact workers have gotten younger as boomer retire. Younger workers earn less since they're earlier in their career. It is a fact that for each point in a career median wage has increased.
[1] https://www.epi.org/publication/understanding-the-historic-d...
You are referencing share of investment, primarily because their stability is counterbalanced by their above-average rakes (or lower returns, depending on how you want to look at it). At 10% of the market, it's a MASSIVE influence, regardless of the attempt to trivialize the number.
> More than half of the poor do it every generation [4].
My interpretations is that it takes 4 generations for 1/16th of the population to move from poor to middle class.
> Using one's own experience and observation to make claims about complex issues like this is terribly and ridiculously incorrect
Making a random jab at an admitted caveat, why? I'll just stop trying to debate a flamebaiting troll, since your points are not compelling and you are posting in bad faith, regardless. GL with whatever.
The parasitic elite (in the US) have CRUSHED the working class by ensuring that entering the middle class is as difficult as possible, while the middle class have largely used property to boost themselves into their own generational wealth. The inflation has been due to US debt, which comes from Military spending, QE, etc. The public market has been dominated by large brands who have a slew of predatory practices (looking at you JPM Chase, Apple, Bank of America, etc). NIMBY policies (by the newly elevated middle class, clutching their pearls) and work centralization in dense urban settings, has hurt the whole situation...but there's hope with Covid, ironically. That's what I believe based on my own observation (and experience).
Lack of diversity, bad. Increased monopoly power, bad. Increased consolidation for following regulations, good.
This is just an argument for communism, and that does not work so well. Planning all the economy in a centralized way, private or public, is a bad idea.
Capitalism is build in the idea of many producers trying to get to many consumers. When you only have one or a few producers it stops being capitalism.
Technically "wealthy" is a neccessary but not sufficent condition for "available assets sufficient to take advantage".
The only way the buyers could lose long term is if the assets go down /even more/ which needless to say would be bad for everyone.
Gross as it sounds I am not sure if there is a better solution possible right now other than "loot the proverbial corpses and move on". It isn't really news in itself.
And megacorps are composed by people. People that have jobs and savings. Not grey abstract entities. Workers. E.g. tech workers.
E.g. how much real state transfer will happen in the Bay Area in the following months?
It's not discussed because people don't care. They are optimizing for one thing and one thing only currently: COVID case counts. Anything to get the number under what they think is a good number, all externalities be damned.
In six months when they can't get their fair trade coffee from their local place, they'll wonder why it is and be sad. But they're as complicit as anyone else in having a zero-tolerance risk threshold with no accounting for externalities.
And please, if you'll accuse others of dripping with bias, attempting to paint this as a strictly left/right issue doesn't work. It's normally the left who claim to care about workers and small businesses, isn't it? Those are the people suffering the most.
What? I guess you didn't see the body count in NYC and NJ?
The thing that you have to understand is that the smbs were competing with other local smbs. So your favorite local coffeeshop only had 4 other competitors (not in SF lol). Ppl who used to type in "yoga classes near me" will be typing in "yoga classes online". Now they're competing against everyone on the internet. Against everyone who has a 5 year lead on them with SEO and marketing. There's just no way an SMB can take them, nor is there enough incentive for digital agencies to help b/c it's such a long shot that they can produce result for the smbs.
Unless there's some search engine that ranks based on locale rather than standard SEO, but that's just not happening.
Most have reinforced their followers on social networks.
There are some reasons to be optimistic for those who make the move!
Yelp works like that as well, Yellow pages and Google Maps too.
Right now 25% of the businesses in the loan book are late with repayments, I expect many of them will default and stop trading. And this is while government subsidies are still going - the subsidies will soon stop.
Covid has been devastating for small businesses which don't operate online and unfortunately I think the fallout will continue up to a year, until we get mass vaccination.
FUD is already spreading among the gullible about the coming vaccines, and I wish I was confident that it'll be a negligible percentage who believe the fake news
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/22/bill-gates-denies-conspiracy...
(I love the counter optimism that if we succeed with a coronavirus vaccine we have a likelihood to vaccinate against nearly a third of the common cold and it can join the flu as something if we'd all annually vaccinate would trouble us a lot less. But pessimism worries that is a big if.)
I want to believe in a November miracle, but pessimism says to curb our enthusiasm (greatly). (Also, it is probably mostly a "coincidence" Dr. Fauci's job currently requires him to say everything will be better by November because of pressure from a certain election cycle.)
There seems to be already about 6 large scale tests in progress in the world (ie. after lab/animal/small group), that's a good sign.
Anyway, I don't see much reason for Dr. Fauci to make such kind of statement if it was still really years away.
The tests will tell where we are, we'll see in a month or two.
I pointed this out two comments up, but the coronavirus family is common enough that something like 1/3 of the causes of the Common Cold is a coronavirus (the rest IIRC are a different family known as rhinoviruses). We've never managed a Common Cold vaccine or vaccines despite something like a century of work (at least as long as we've been fighting annual flu season with flu vaccines). In the immediate past couple of decades we've seen an increasing number of deadly coronaviruses: the first SARS virus (this being the second), the MERS virus, basically several of the things in the last few years people have been referring to by possibly misnomers like "avian flu" and "swine flu" have been in this family and so forth. So far we've not been successful in creating a vaccine for any of those. No coronavirus in human history has a vaccine, and there is a lot of history with the family (contrary to whatever racist and/or "animal jumping" theories people have that this is something very radically new; it's a "very uncommon cold").
On the hopeful side, Science often builds strongly on failure, and so it could be that we are perfectly set up for a breakthrough from all of this history of vaccine failure. (And again, I pointed out two comments above the hopeful optimism that a coronavirus vaccine puts us on a wonderful path to possible a common cold vaccine. That could be amazing for future humanity.)
Just that history so far with this entire family/category of viruses doesn't give us a lot of room for hope right now.
VE Day was two and a half decades after the Spanish Flu pandemic.
I don't know if that is true. Maybe just a lie to make the public believe it is safe.
As far as my understanding for clinical trials goes, we can still have the exact same tests with the exact same criteria and quality but still speed up the overall process. Simply by eliminating the default waterfall and accepting higher financial risk. (Also higher medical risk, but only within the trials, not for the end-product).
Usually, one would run the various trials strictly in order:
trial_stage = 0;
while (trial_stage < 4)
execute(trial_stage)
if (evaluate(trial_stage) == success)
trial_stage++
do
Theses no way there will be a vaccine pushed out before late 2021. That's an optimistic start
Maybe, maybe high risk workers might start larger rollouts mid next year. But even if it's true their vaccine might not even be the one you might be offered.
Being high risk workers you'll also know little since you won't be able to sort danger between the vaccine and their work.
At your safety level you are asking for late 2022 would be an early option. But then the risk from C19 might lower, so you'll have to reassess then.
I doubt most people will get the vaccine.
By now the vaccine has clearly shifted in purpose from a medical one to a primarily psychological one. For people who are wedded to lockdowns and can't admit how disastrous they are, a vaccine is a face-saving exit criteria. It comes with the bonus of more top-down control of the population too!
The other side of this, is that larger business are taking advantage of the small business' desperation, to buy them at rapacious prices, or coerce them into really bad deals.
Meaning that some of the small businesses that "survive" this downturn, have just postponed death.
I'd recommend this piece: https://medium.com/@mtracey/two-months-since-the-riots-and-s... It's a somewhat long-winded bit of reporting, and has a certain media-cynic slant to it, but gives an on-the-ground perspective into how businesses in less-populous areas affected by the unrest in late May have been coping.
Unemployment and GDP are impacted by these closures, but without showing up as their own segment, not much is being done to counteract it.
Retail & shopping centers are looking like ghost towns, and that is not good for overall economic health once we get to the other side.
Folks have more pressing worries on their plate than weddings or proms.
I think it's similar to what your partner is seeing. For many of these businesses, there is a viable online path. But that assumes that they have the skills and desire to operate an online business.
Some of these small businesses are operated by folks who may know how to operate in a local market, and have very little interest in e-marketing and shipping products.
I'm not sure the world's 50,000th best yoga instructor can make a living selling online yoga classes.
Virtual removes that advantage and now favors expertise over distance to instructor. Definitely moves more of the win to the top 1% in each skillset.
It's a big win if you are in that top quantile, but means if you aren't maybe find the thing you are top 1% of? Not sure...just seeds for thought
EVERYONE here claiming 'just move your product online' and 'sales have doubled for people who moved online'
do not understand the nature of competition online
You have to be Top 1% online to survive
Top 0.1% to thrive
In the real world you can be the third best coffee shop or t shirt shop in your locality and still do well
https://www.xero.com/small-business-insights/
Again, it’s likely to undercount low / no-tech businesses and over count those that were already looking towards technology as a differentiator (having decided to move their accounting to the cloud)
Tell that to Hertz
Per the article:
> While the businesses are small individually, the collective impact of their failures could be substantial. Firms with fewer than 500 employees account for about 44% of U.S. economic activity, according to a U.S. Small Business Administration report, and they employ almost half of all American workers.
It's appalling that all the focus in politics is on big companies and giving them handouts.
In the UK unemployment stats haven't moved, despite huge numbers of job losses, because for someone to be classified as unemployed they must be looking for work. But there's no work to find so people aren't looking. That's why technical unemployment often acts in odd ways: a booming economy may not see unemployment fall for a while because people who became economically inactive restart a job search, so get added to the ranks of the unemployed.