I think part of the reason the US doesn't feel like the US anymore is that ownership of properties is no longer Bob who dreamed of some day opening a Pizza shop on Main st. It's all corporate now, all the way down.
The US has devolved to the point where only someone with a large amount of wealth can start and run a business. You can't open up a small hardware shop anymore because no bank will give that loan and no supplier will give you the same wholesale prices they give to the likes of Home Depot or Lowes or heck even Walmart.
At every level in the supply distribution system we've seen consolidation and ultimately locking out of competition.
For example, here's why independent pharmacists have been going out of business [1]. We need new Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt anti-trust breakups to make capitalism work again. Capitalism can't work without a diverse competitive market.
Too bad the oligarchs slowly whittled away the government immune system until it was weak enough to infect last election cycle and is busy destroying what little is left. America seems to be headed into a feudal dark age. Once the government is toothless only the people can fix it with mass protest and/or violence.
Things seem bleak, but we've been here before and came out of it better.
Are the Mom & Pops going to deliver an order you place at 4 pm on your phone by 10 am the next morning? Because if not the antitrust measures you suggest are going to be deeply unpopular among a middle class that's used to having a stream of Amazon packages being delivered every day.
There are diminishing returns to efficiency. Grocery stores, for example, are just as efficient as Amazon is even though many of them are a fraction of the size. Something like a gas station will be just as efficient whether it's ran by a mom and pop or whether it's ran by Shell.
> Are the Mom & Pops going to deliver an order you place at 4 pm on your phone by 10 am the next morning?
Often yes, if it's in inventory. If it's not you'll have to wait longer than you would with amazon. In fact, one of the benefits of mom and pop shops is that they can generally get things delivered to you same day because they live in the same city as you do. Much like you get same day delivery from a restaurant even though they are often mom and pop shops.
But to my point above, you don't need a company the size of amazon to get next day delivery. Amazon could be broken up into several smaller (but still big) companies and it'd have close to exactly the same efficiency. It would also result in lower prices because now Amazon would have actual competition.
Oh sure the large corporate model of stores may have a bigger pile of capital in their accounting book to spend versus the same grouping of small independent stores even if they were added together, but nowhere in the accounting book is there any mention of money leaving local economies and ultimately making it poorer and down the line reducing the value of the community which devalues the stores too.
Also a mom and pop store is far more likely to be able to and willing to break from the standard mold and let you call at 4 PM and then come pick something up at 7 PM after the store would normally be closed. That might also seem "inefficient" because now some employee is sitting around an extra two hours just to serve one customer. But what about the efficiency on the customer's side who may gain even greater value by having that thing ready to go at 5 am the next day?
Very few people are accounting for all the "efficiencies" that are not represented by capital holding in somebody's accounting book.
Yeah, my hometown is a good example of that. It has always had a population of around 300 people. When my dad was a kid it had a hardware store, a grocery store, a bowling alley, a restaurant, a pharmacy, and an auto repair shop.
Every single one of those shops closed and a big reason why they closed is because distributors decided they didn't want to deal with them anymore. So they raised their minimum order size and decrease the discount to the point where the same product could be had for a lower price by traveling 40 minutes away to the nearest Walmart or Home Depot. In fact, the grocery store closed while I was a kid and, in the end, what the owner was doing was literally going to walmart and reselling what they purchased retail.
That has had a cascading effect on the town and services available in town. It's also caused a number of longtime families to move out and away because the work they did dried up.
Where the small town had a large amount of economic activity and jobs, those all dried up to where now basically every kid born there moves away. There's no way for that town to grow and prosper.
But the real issue here a that people stop at a 7-Eleven where if the same building in same condition said Bobs Convenience Store, they would not. We learned that decades ago.
It does not mean that McDonald’s replaced all restaurants, nor that they are better, but it does mean that when you go to one you know exactly what you are going to get vs the uncertainty of the unknown competitor.
It’s why suburbia all looks the same.
And for that matter, it’s happening in cities that pride themselves on not having things like McDonald’s. There is cool kids Blue Bottle coffee in SF, and LA, etc. Whole Foods used to be only in hip places and now it anywhere trying to be hip (don’t worry, Erehwon is here to soak up hipsters cash).
I guess we can debate if that isn't what the US is about, but regardless, it is depressing.
Traveling around the US, the most notable thing is how everything is the same. It is so horrible. No matter where you go, it's the same chain stores, often in the same arrangement and layout. If you get dropped blindly in most towns in the US, there is no way to tell any difference, it's all cookie cutter identical.
Occasionally you run into town that have character and a unique style. Those are the treasures of the US. But I'm sure soon enough those will also be paved over with the same fast foods and chain stores to comply with being identical.