See for example the outrage when LastPass announced they’d start charging a few dollars a month.
In the case of small local businesses, each one is like a tiny startup, often someone's life's dream, with (by tech standards) very little investment, hard to hire for labor, a ton of regulations to work around, ever increasing rent, etc. They just cannot offer their services for free; it's not like they can just buy more VMs and scale up their coffee production or staff or whatever.
The OP wants community, but the people who work hard to create local communities have bills to pay too. SWEs talk about FIRE while some of the waitstaff may never even be able to retire, or have health insurance or vacations, etc. C'mon, it's not going to make or break you to actually contribute to local economic activity instead of hoarding wealth.