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Comment by dingnuts | Hacker News Reader

spoken like someone who has never been a regular at a small business. there are all kinds of benefits when you get to know the guy who owns you favorite pizza shop for instance

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As a good friend of a restaurant owner I have personal experience with this and you're friends with the people, not the company.

Restaurant owner friend transferred his company to new ownership, and I would never ask for the kinds of goodies the previous owner gave me. Because it was the owner, not the company, with which I had a relationship.

Splitting hairs. At the time your friend owned it, the company and people were one and the same.

I think that falls under a real relationship with a specific person. You can definitely have those, but a larger Corp isn't going to let employees do that very much

A small business owner has much more control over it than a local manager in a big corporation does so there are more benefits to becoming friends with them. That doesn't happen with large companies since there is no singular "owner" in public companies, even the CEO has to listen to the profit demands of the investors.

I think the key aspect here is scale: if the person making the decision knows the people affected, you usually see a pattern of different results than without that human connection. Large companies tend to be bad both from isolation and because the frontline people increasingly are not allowed to make decisions or consulted or even known by the people who are.

You get it. Being a regular at my local sushi place (once a week typically), they would always give me free extra stuff, and stuff that wasn't on the menu for free. The chefs would also try out new (delicious) dishes on me. Why would I ever go anywhere else?? That's loyalty to a business. I recommend them to everyone.

That’s a very strange and long reaching assumption to make from a post which literally said a local trader is more likely to care for you.

Reading aye…

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