The advent of big box stores like Wallmart over the past 30 years, served to shutter local competitors and replace those business owners, craftspeople and workers (who spent, hired and invested in the community) with slave-wage manufacturing jobs in developing countries and minimum wage retail positions at home. As these publicly traded conglomerates “scaled up”, local economies, wages and social-stability scaled down. Luckily, a trend this extreme and economically self-defeating, could never continue forever and has sown the seeds of its own demise.
Progressive business models today are focused on moving back from global distribution conglomerates to those that help to increase efficiency at the individual household and community level and re-circulate savings and spending back through local and national economies rather than siphoning cash away to external investors that live and spend elsewhere.
Scaling up household and local strength, will mean reducing the choke-hold of large multi-national corporations and institutions. We should expect the status quo to warn of economic disaster, “uncertainty” and “instability’ as this evolution proceeds. They mean, for themselves. The real world: working people and small business owners, live with risk and uncertainty every day. We are used to it. It’s the executives, politicians and so called ‘investors’ who have grown fat on globalization and the extraction of passive profits, that have been under the delusion of ‘certainty’ the past decade. They are the ones who have the most to lose now as more equitable, value-added business models evolve.
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