Recently, I sat down with a small-business owner who was explaining to me how difficult it has become to sustain and grow her business in a marketplace increasingly dominated by large corporations.
She is trying to compete with companies that can hire entire teams.
They can spend millions on advertising.
They can negotiate purchasing contracts that dramatically lower their costs.
They can invest in artificial intelligence, automation, distribution centers, technology and infrastructure.
They can absorb losses that could devastate a small business.
They have resources she simply does not have.
And as she talked, I found myself explaining something to her that I think many small-business owners need to hear:
What you are experiencing is not necessarily evidence that you are doing something wrong.
There are structural differences between competing as an independent business and competing against corporations operating at national or global scale.
You cannot always outspend them.
You cannot always outprice them.
You cannot always outhire them.
And you certainly cannot compete with billions of dollars in capital.
But something happened during that conversation.
My own thinking shifted.
I stopped thinking only about how she could compete with their quantity.
And I started thinking about the quality of what she was building.
Why Small Business Matters Beyond Revenue and Scale
No, this business owner cannot hire every member of the team she would like to have right now.
She cannot employ hundreds of thousands of people.
She cannot invest billions of dollars into technology.
She may never operate thousands of locations.
She may never become a billion-dollar corporation.
But there is something she is already doing that matters tremendously:
She is making sure the people who work for her can afford to live.
She pays her employees a livable wage.
Her employees are not depending on government assistance to make up the difference between what she pays them and what it actually costs them to live.
They are not having to work two or three jobs simply to survive.
And that made me ask a different question:
Why have we decided that size is one of the primary measurements of business success?
We celebrate the company with 100,000 employees.
The billion-dollar valuation.
The thousands of locations.
The record-breaking revenue.
The enormous quarterly profit.
The speed at which the company scaled.
But perhaps we should be asking another question too:
What Happened to the People Because Your Business Exists?
Can your employees afford groceries?
Can they pay their rent or mortgage?
Can they take care of their children?
Can they go to the doctor?
Can they save something from their paycheck?
Can they have a life outside of work?
Can they someday buy a home?
Can they eventually start something of their own?
Maybe employing five people and making sure those five people can support themselves and their families deserves more recognition than we give it.
Maybe creating one genuinely good job matters more than creating ten jobs that cannot sustain the human beings working them.
That is quality over quantity.
And small-business owners should not underestimate the value of that.
The Economic Impact of Small Businesses Goes Beyond Job Numbers
This is not an argument against successful corporations.
Large companies provide goods and services millions of people rely upon.
They create employment.
They develop technologies.
They build infrastructure.
They make investments smaller companies simply cannot make.
But financial scale should not automatically become our definition of economic virtue.
Because the numbers tell another side of the American economic story.
In 2026, the U.S. Government Accountability Office released an analysis of working adults receiving Medicaid or living in households receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits.
The GAO estimated that in 2024, 13.8 million adults enrolled in Medicaid and 10.6 million adults living in households receiving SNAP benefits had worked during the year.
About two-thirds worked full-time schedules, and 88% of these wage-earning adults worked in the private sector. [1]
These are not simply people disconnected from the workforce.
Millions of them are working.
And when the GAO examined employer data from selected states, some of America's largest corporations repeatedly appeared among employers of working adults receiving Medicaid or SNAP.
Walmart and Amazon were among those employers. [2]
Those numbers must be understood carefully.
The data came from selected states, not the entire United States. Public-assistance eligibility also depends on factors such as household size, total household income and hours worked.
It would therefore be inaccurate to say that an employer's wage alone caused every worker to qualify for assistance.
But that does not make the larger question disappear.
People can work for some of the most successful corporations in America and still qualify for government assistance designed to help households afford food and healthcare.
That deserves our attention.
At What Point Does the Human Being Become an Investment Too?
Amazon provides an interesting example of this tension.
In September 2026, Amazon announced that it was investing more than $1.5 billion in additional compensation for its U.S. core operations employees.
The company raised minimum starting pay for full-time core operations positions to $20 an hour, with average hourly pay approaching $24 an hour. [3]
That investment should be acknowledged.
But Amazon is also expected to spend approximately $220 billion in capital expenditures during 2026, driven heavily by demand for cloud-computing and artificial-intelligence infrastructure. [4]
These are different categories of spending.
I am not suggesting that capital expenditures can simply be converted dollar-for-dollar into wages.
That is not the point.
The point is what we instinctively call an investment.
We invest in artificial intelligence.
We invest in automation.
We invest in warehouses.
We invest in data centers.
We invest in supply-chain technology.
We invest in expansion.
We invest in machines that may make companies more productive.
But when the conversation turns to the human beings who make those companies function, we often change the vocabulary.
Now we are discussing labor costs.
Why?
At what point does the human being become an investment too?
Walmart Is Investing Heavily in the Future Too
Walmart's 2026 reporting says the company expects approximately $25 billion to $27 billion in capital expenditures for fiscal 2027, including investments in technology, supply-chain systems and customer-facing initiatives. [5]
Walmart has also increasingly incorporated automation and artificial intelligence into its operations.
Again, investment itself is not the enemy.
Technology is not the enemy.
Artificial intelligence is not the enemy.
Automation is not automatically the enemy.
Businesses should innovate.
Businesses should become more productive.
Businesses should prepare for the future.
I run a business.
I use technology.
I use artificial intelligence.
I believe in business optimization.
But optimization should ultimately serve people.
We cannot discuss the future of business as though human beings are merely an inconvenient expense standing between corporations and greater efficiency.
These companies still depend on people.
Someone receives the merchandise.
Someone stocks the shelf.
Someone drives the truck.
Someone fills the order.
Someone maintains the equipment.
Someone cleans the facility.
Someone answers the customer.
Someone supervises employees.
Someone handles the problem the automated system cannot solve.
And after that shift, someone goes home to a family.
Human beings are not pieces of equipment.
They need food.
They need housing.
They need healthcare.
They need transportation.
They need clothing.
They need rest.
They need time with their families.
And hopefully, they should have enough left over after satisfying their basic needs to actually participate in life.
To take their child somewhere.
To save.
To invest.
To purchase a home.
To support another business.
To start a business of their own.
A decent quality of life should not be considered an extravagant demand from someone who works.
Then I Looked at What Is Happening at the Grocery Store
The deeper I looked, the more this conversation expanded beyond employment.
Recent consumer data from Numerator found a striking shift in Kroger's customer base.
During the 12 months ending July 31, 2026, Kroger gained more than 1 million higher-income households while losing approximately 700,000 lower-income households.
Lower-income Kroger shoppers reduced their consumer-packaged-goods spending at the retailer by 5.2% and made approximately 30 million fewer trips.
The analysis also found billions of dollars in consumer-packaged-goods spending shifting toward competitors including Walmart, Amazon and Costco. [6]
I want to be careful about what those numbers do and do not tell us.
They do not prove that Kroger's new higher-income customers previously shopped at Whole Foods or Trader Joe's.
And the 700,000 lower-income households were not identified as SNAP recipients.
But the income shift itself is important.
A mainstream grocery retailer gained more than a million higher-income households while losing hundreds of thousands of lower-income households.
Lower-income households were making substantially fewer trips.
And that made me wonder:
How Far Down Are Working Americans Supposed to Go?
If people who once comfortably occupied one level of the marketplace become more price-sensitive...
and people who were already at the lower end of the income spectrum have to pull back even further...
where do they go next?
And what happens to the businesses depending on those customers?
The Family Looking for the Lowest Price Is Not the Problem
It is easy to tell people to “shop small.”
I believe in supporting small businesses.
Obviously.
But I also believe we have to be realistic.
If a family has $100 available for groceries and buying from a large retailer allows them to stretch that money further, I am not going to shame that family for making the choice they need to make.
If something costs $4 at a major retailer and $7 from an independent business, a household struggling to afford rent and food may not have the luxury of choosing the $7 option.
People cannot spend money they do not have.
And that is exactly why the problem is bigger than consumer preference.
When working people have less disposable income, they become more price-sensitive.
More spending moves toward corporations capable of using enormous purchasing power, technology, distribution systems and economies of scale to compete aggressively on price.
Those corporations become larger.
Independent businesses lose customers.
The large corporation acquires even more resources.
The competitive gap becomes wider.
And the next person trying to start an independent business faces an even more difficult marketplace.
It becomes a cycle.
And eventually, an economic system supposedly built around competition can become increasingly concentrated among the companies already powerful enough to dominate it.
Small Business Is Not a Side Story in the American Economy
Sometimes the way we talk about small business makes it sound almost sentimental.
“Shop local.”
“Support mom and pop.”
“Small businesses are the backbone of America.”
Those statements sound nice.
But the numbers tell us this is much more than sentiment.
According to the U.S. Small Business Administration's Office of Advocacy, as of 2026 the United States had more than 36.2 million small businesses.
Those businesses employ approximately 62.3 million people—45.9% of America's private-sector workforce. [7]
Nearly half.
Small business is not a side economy.
It is a massive portion of the American economy.
And small businesses do something particularly important:
They distribute economic opportunity.
A hairstylist rents a suite.
A restaurant buys from a supplier.
A contractor hires an assistant.
A consultant hires a designer.
A bakery pays a printer.
A business owner hires an accountant.
A photographer gets referred to another customer.
A local company sponsors a youth team.
A customer tells a friend.
One small business supports another.
Money circulates through relationships.
Ownership remains distributed.
And perhaps most importantly:
The employee of today can still imagine becoming the owner of tomorrow.
That possibility matters.
What Happens When Ownership Becomes Concentrated?
The concern is not simply that a neighborhood store closes.
The larger question is what happens when more and more commerce becomes concentrated among fewer corporations.
If independent businesses disappear , consumers may eventually have fewer choices.
Communities may have fewer locally owned assets.
Entrepreneurs face higher barriers to entry.
More employment becomes dependent upon a smaller number of enormous organizations.
And more wealth and decision-making power becomes concentrated farther away from the communities affected by those decisions.
Small businesses help prevent that concentration.
They create more owners.
More competitors.
More employers.
More ideas.
More opportunities for someone without generational wealth or corporate power to build something of their own.
That is why supporting small business is not charity.
And it isn't about protecting businesses that refuse to adapt.
Small businesses should improve.
They should use technology.
They should understand their numbers.
They should modernize.
They should become more efficient.
They should compete.
But there is a difference between telling an independent business to become better and expecting it to become Amazon.
Quality Over Quantity
I keep coming back to the business owner who started this entire thought process for me.
She may look at a corporation with thousands of employees and feel small.
But I don't.
Not anymore.
Because perhaps we need more than one definition of scale.
There is financial scale.
There is operational scale.
There is geographic scale.
But there is also human impact.
If a business employs five people and those five people can support themselves because that business exists, that is impact.
If a business creates an environment where employees are respected, that is impact.
If those workers can go home without immediately leaving for a second job, that is impact.
If a business owner's decisions allow another family to live with greater stability, that is impact.
Maybe that company will eventually employ 50 people.
Maybe it won't.
But bigger is not automatically better simply because it is bigger.
And small-business owners should stop allowing the marketplace to convince them that the only meaningful business is one that scales endlessly.
Sometimes success is not:
How many people did you employ?
Sometimes the better question is:
How well did the people you employ live because you were their employer?
This Is Not About Doom and Gloom
I don't want anyone to read this and walk away believing everything is hopeless.
That is not why I wrote it.
This is about awareness.
It is about paying attention to where our economy is moving.
It is about asking difficult questions of businesses and institutions with enormous power.
It is about holding those responsible for their decisions accountable when those decisions affect millions of people.
And it is also about recognizing the power that ordinary people still have.
As Americans, we can do our best to support one another.
When we are financially able, we can support the independent business.
We can hire locally.
We can recommend someone's company.
We can share someone's work.
We can make a referral.
We can introduce two business owners who may be able to help each other.
We can speak when something is unfair.
And those of us who have platforms, businesses, audiences, relationships, knowledge or resources can use them to advocate for the little guy.
Not because every small business is automatically ethical.
Not because every large corporation is the enemy.
And not because shopping locally will somehow solve every structural problem in the American economy.
But because someone has to keep asking whether the people with the least power are being considered when the biggest decisions are being made.
Someone has to keep reminding us that there are human beings behind the numbers.
Someone has to make space for the independent business owner who cannot outspend, outprice or outscale a corporation worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
And someone has to keep saying that success should not belong only to the biggest player in the room.
Business Optimization Should Not Mean Optimizing People Out of the Equation
At Business & Brand Intelligence, I believe businesses should become stronger.
They should understand what is holding them back.
They should improve operations.
They should use technology intelligently.
They should protect margins.
They should grow.
They should make money.
But growth should have a purpose beyond simply becoming larger.
Business optimization should not mean optimizing human beings out of the equation.
A healthy company should create value for its owners.
It should create value for its customers.
And when it employs people, it should also consider the quality of the lives being supported by that employment.
Because businesses do not exist in isolation.
They exist inside communities.
Their workers are also consumers.
Their customers may also be business owners.
Their employees may someday become entrepreneurs.
Their vendors employ other people.
Their decisions ripple outward.
And that is why this conversation matters.
Maybe the Better Question Is Not “How Big Can We Get?”
Maybe the better question is:
How much good can we create while we grow?
Can we build companies that are profitable without forgetting the people who produce that profit?
Can technology increase productivity while workers share in some of that increased prosperity?
Can a business grow without treating every additional dollar paid to a human being as something that must be minimized?
Can small businesses create fewer jobs but better ones?
Can consumers support independent businesses when they have the means to do so?
Can business owners support one another rather than treating every other company as a competitor?
Can those of us with platforms and resources advocate for businesses and people who do not have the same reach?
I believe we can.
That is why this is not a doom-and-gloom story.
It is a call for awareness.
A call for accountability.
And a call for community.
People Have to Matter Too
Business matters.
Profit matters.
Growth matters.
Technology matters.
Innovation matters.
Efficiency matters.
But people have to matter too.
The success of an economy cannot only be measured by how large its corporations become.
We also have to ask:
How well are the people living inside that economy actually able to live?
Can they afford food?
Can they afford housing?
Can they raise families?
Can they build savings?
Can they participate in their communities?
Can they support another business?
Can they become owners themselves?
Can they still dream beyond survival?
Because if economic growth continually moves upward while ordinary working Americans continually have to move downward, we should be willing to question whether we are actually moving forward.
The small-business owner I spoke with may never employ hundreds of thousands of people.
But the people she does employ matter.
The families connected to those employees matter.
The customers who depend on her matter.
The businesses she supports matter.
The community she participates in matters.
And the fact that she is building something without losing sight of the human beings helping her build it matters.
That is not insignificant.
That is business impact.
That is quality over quantity.
And that is exactly why small business still matters.
Sources
Federal Social Safety Net Programs: Millions of Workers, Including Many Employed by Large Employers, Continue to Rely on Medicaid and SNAP.
The GAO estimated that 13.8 million working adults were enrolled in Medicaid and 10.6 million working adults lived in households receiving SNAP during 2024. Approximately two-thirds worked full-time, and 88% were employed in the private sector.
GAO analysis of selected state data identified Walmart, Amazon and other large employers among employers of working adults participating in Medicaid and SNAP. These figures represent selected states and should not be interpreted as national employer totals.
Amazon announced more than $1.5 billion in additional compensation for U.S. core operations employees, raising minimum starting pay for full-time core operations roles to $20 per hour, with average hourly pay approaching $24.
Amazon increased its expected 2026 capital expenditures to approximately $220 billion amid continued investment in cloud computing and artificial-intelligence infrastructure.
Walmart projected approximately $25 billion to $27 billion in capital expenditures for fiscal 2027, including investment in technology, supply-chain infrastructure and customer-facing initiatives. Walmart also discusses ongoing investment in automation and artificial intelligence.
During the 12 months ending July 31, 2026, Kroger gained more than 1 million higher-income households while losing approximately 700,000 lower-income households. Lower-income shoppers reduced consumer-packaged-goods spending at Kroger by 5.2% and made approximately 30 million fewer trips.
The United States had approximately 36.2 million small businesses employing 62.3 million people, representing 45.9% of the private-sector workforce.
Helping small-business owners figure out what is actually holding the business back before they spend more money trying to fix the wrong thing.
Small Businesses Deserve Better Information Before They Spend More.
The $297 Business Optimization Diagnostic helps identify what may actually be holding the business back, where attention should go first, and what the next 90 days should focus on.