Many practices that have become common in today’s business world need to be re-examined from the standpoint of the effects they have on smaller enterprises.

For example, giant companies like Amazon collect data on the smaller businesses that use their online hosting, order fulfillment, and shipping services—and when they see someone succeed in a specialty niche, they set up their own shop in the same space.  Then they change their searches to present their own newly-established site first.  This essentially steals that market.

It isn’t right. Companies that operate platforms like the Amazon Marketplace should be flatly forbidden to also own or operate businesses that compete on those platforms.

Retailers’ slotting allowances also bear looking into.  These are fees manufacturers pay stores to have their products displayed on retail shelves.  The biggest companies can comfortably absorb these costs—with results like when your favorite brand of toothpaste suddenly metastasizes into fourteen ALL NEW variants whose main reason for being is apparently to demonstrate that some marketing executive is doing something to justify his exorbitant salary.  The result is that you have to waste time rummaging through all those mutant monsters just to come up with the simple product you want.

Meanwhile, smaller manufacturers often can’t afford to pay the rising fees, and are effectively blocked from entry into the marketplace.  

Do we really want a business milieu where only behemoths get a chance to compete?  Especially in a world whose gigantism of scale pushes people into toxic levels of feeling like nobodies?