The text on the image reads:

“When you buy from a small business, the money from your purchase doesn’t go toward buying a third house for a CEO. It goes toward a little girl’s dance classes and a little boy’s football training. And toward helping their parents put food on the table. Thank you for buying from small businesses.”

At first glance, the decline and bankruptcy of small shops in cities — their living space being swallowed up by large shopping centers — appears to be a tragedy for small and medium-sized enterprises. The long-standing foundation of economic stability in many states seems to be dissolving under the pressure of corporations.

However, when a customer chooses to buy a more expensive product from a small entrepreneur instead of purchasing the same-quality but cheaper product in a supermarket, that customer is, in fact, financing the degradation of the parents of those very children who “need food and want to attend dance and football classes,” as the image claims. The market therefore eliminates such small businesses in order to cleanse the economy of unproductive labor.

The situation looks as if the sector of distribution (and it is distribution, not production) is evolving toward the complete removal of non-intellectual human labor — cashiers, loaders, couriers, and so on.

In my view, this is the inevitable fate of contemporary small-scale retail and an unavoidable evolutionary economic trend: the total automation of business processes. After all, it is simply economically advantageous.

So what, then, should owners and employees of small shops do? What should the frontline workers of large supermarkets and shopping centers do?

Learn something new.