I'm not saying all large businesses become monopolies. They just push for them. Equilibriums definitely exist for certain businesses. But for things like, say, Epipens? Or the way they'll umbrella everything under them eventually? Hell, I've not enough got anything much against most chains. It's multi-national corporations that have issues.
And restaurants probably have one of the highest rates of competitiveness. Compare, say, markers.
Can and do are different things. Small business people can harass people, but because they have no recourse other than the local area and community for their business, they're much more accountable on a personal level.
You must have experienced very different service industries then my experience of having a manager fire three different people in two months because she didn't like their attitude. Out of a group of six.
Isn't the issue about discrimination, though? If someone can't work with the group, that's a valid reason to fire someone, as far as I know. But I know very little about that specific instance, and anecdotes are anecdotes in any case. I'm sure that labor unions would solve the issue pretty handily as well, but I also think this might be a case of it depending on the environment. Cities, with a glut of available labor, probably do better with big industries and scales of economy and labor unions, where they're already local financial centers, while small towns probably do best with similarly small businesses, where they won't be essentially overrun.
I read something about why cities are typically democratic, and it's a similar thing; cities are expensive, and you depend on the people around you. You really can't be self-sufficient, typically, in the manner of the Republican ideal. When people are down on their luck, you see a lot more of them a lot more often, because there's such a concentration of people. Plus, the mixing pot means you get exposed to such And welfare has to be high because of how expensive things are. Meanwhile, rural areas are conservative because when the welfare calibration is designed for cities, when work becomes hard to find, it becomes easier for the people who are willing to leech off the system to just sit back and do so. I notice a lot of statistics brought up about how red states tend to be net tax drains while the blue states tend to be tax producers, and that this thereby means Republicans are voting against themselves, when it could well be that Republicans are being exposed to the sorts of folks that are willing to take advantage of the system, while Democrats see people that depend on the social safety net to bounce back, rather than use it as a hammock. Makes me wonder if differential policies based on local cost of living or the like would be a good idea for welfare.