Corporate Wasteland

A particularly good column, "The Charts That Show How Big Business Is Winning," by David Leonhardt, appeared in yesterday's paper.  More people now are employed by large corporations than small companies:

In the late 1980s, small companies were still a lot bigger, combined, than big companies. In 1989, firms with fewer than 50 workers employed about one-third of American workers — accounting for millions more jobs than companies with at least 10,000 employees.

Since then, though, many small businesses have struggled to keep up with the new corporate giants and with foreign competition. You can probably see a version of the story in your community. The hardware store has given way to The Home Depot. The local hospital and bank are owned by a chain. The supermarket is Whole Foods, which is now owned by Amazon. The family-owned manufacturer may simply be out of business.

The share of Americans working for small companies fell to 27.4 percent in 2014, the most recent year for which data exists, down from 32.4 in 1989. And big companies have grown by almost an identical amount. Today, companies with at least 10,000 workers employ more people than companies with fewer than 50 workers.

Of course it's noticeable in my own neighborhood (see my account from five years ago), but it also struck me when I was down in the Bay Area several years ago to run the Bay To Breakers with my father. We parked his car in a Berkeley fee lot with the intention of taking BART to San Francisco. But it was so early that weekend morning that BART wasn't running. We ended up taking a bus through Oakland surface streets, hooking up with the Bay Bridge, before being disgorged at the Embarcadero.

I had gone to school in the Bay Area in the 1980s, moving to the East Coast in 1988. When I lived in the Bay Area, Oakland and San Francisco were chock full of little mom & pop shops, artisanal bakeries, taquerias, record stores, fabric emporiums, you name it. Corporate entities like McDonalds or Sears were outliers in the city.

What I saw from the bus window that May morning was nothing but storefronts of national chains: Qdoba, Starbucks, Verizon. It was shocking. From the small-business rainbow of the 1980s to a colorless, desiccated corporate wasteland in 2015.