Big Business is Best

It’s easy to hate a bully, they are big, they are mean, they crush other people and take from them because they can. It’s easy to recognize a bully in person, but what about corporations? It’s not so obvious. It’s easy to confuse success with being a bully. It is very tempting to look at a large business that undersells and runs out other smaller businesses and judge it harshly. I like to root for the underdog too, but thinking about it is that really the right way to judge a company. It’s as though being successful as a corporation is enough evidence to convict a corporation. To an extent it is true that large businesses can and do throw their weight around, and I’m not saying that is always right. I think there are certainly a lot of large companies that absolutely do wrong. But I also think that a lot of smaller businesses do a lot of things wrong to. Being successful is not a legitimate excuse to condemn a company.

Large companies such as Wal-Mart, McDonalds, K-Mart, and so on are frequently blasted with hate for no other reason than they are successful. The reason most all large corporations are successful is because they are better than smaller businesses. (If you worship small businesses as some sort of American historical figure-head, please take a minute to cool off and then keep reading). In America, your dollar is your vote. If you don’t like something you don’t vote for it. If you go to a place that you don’t like, then you quit going there—you vote against it. Big businesses did not steal their standings at the top in consumers’ minds because they forced people into going there to shop. People chose to go there, they chose to spend their vote on the big businesses we have now. If you want to complain about big businesses, you may as well complain about America as well. This is the formula that has made America so successful. I know that the capitalistic system has some problems, but it has worked pretty good for us. Don’t complain about a system that works and propose illegalizing being successful—you may want to consider moving to a different less democratic nation actually.

It’s just like politicians that we vote into office; we are never unanimous about who is in office, but that is who the general masses of people chose to support. It is the same way for our large companies, that majority of people voted for them, and continue to vote for them. I have heard people say that companies are so large that they can’t fail; they are too strong to let anyone else rise up to compete with them and my analogy above is no longer true. That argument is wrong. Yes, it may be difficult to start a company that competes with and eventually overtakes a large company. But don’t buy into the idea that big businesses are invincible. It’s pretty easy to find a list of large companies that have failed recently. In fact, I think I remember hearing about how the government actually bailed-out some of our large businesses that we deemed too big to fail. This is actually good, it’s my opinion that they should have failed. The American people voted them out of office when they quit buying their products.

It is the fierce competition between companies that ensures that we get good products at good prices. If there was no competition, then there would be no incentive to do better, no reason to improve. Right now, big businesses are highly competitive. That means that companies that want to beat them have to work harder and do things even better to compete with them. Pushing companies to provide the best product at the best price is not hurting us, it hurts companies that are doing a bad job. The thing about America is we try to vote for the one that is going to help us the most. Our votes made big businesses big, not bullying. If we are mad at anyone, we should be mad at ourselves. It’s our votes that got them elected as our business leaders.