The goodness that comes from this the community it creates. Big retailers don’t create community. You can tell because they have programs and advertising that makes it sounds like they do. I loathe big business more and more each day. Big business is plastic.
I made my living from doing business with big businesses. It became increasingly more distasteful each year. My solace was knowing that I wasn’t an employee and my contracts would come to an end. The political correctness, group think, and utter lack of critical thinking was difficult to handle. It must only be worse today given so much wokeness. All of that to me is antithetical to being a rugged individualistic American.
For America to survive, entrepreneurs and small businessMEN who are rooted in their communities need to lead the way.
“driving the thugs from the hood.”
Only works if they are shot while looting.
You have much more expertise in this area than I, but from what I’ve read and occasionally seen your hope for local support of small businesses in the urban deserts is not likely to happen.
The people who are willing to take the risks to open small shops in these areas seem to be recent immigrants, now the trend is Arabs, earlier, people from east Asia. The have no inherent fondness for their customers and they tend not to trust them and take active measures to prevent theft. Both their honest and dishonest clientele resent this. And theirs will be the first businesses attacked the next time there is an opportunity ‘to let the people touch those things’.
Now, if the honest people in urban areas, the majority, would take active measures against the dishonest, there would be hope. But there has been little evidence of that happening anywhere.
Ghetto dwellers don’t care. They’ll give lip service to “supporting black businesses” but as soon as the big chains leave, they’ll loot all the small black businesses to death also.