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Faceless, mechanized, dehumanizing profit maximization, or the personal, in-your-face viciousness of a petty tyrant lording over a fief. Tough choice.
Small business owners are tricky because maybe you open up a pizza place because you genuinely love the craft of making pizza and want to become an integral part of your neighborhood, or maybe you open up a pizza place because you want to see your name on a big sign.
It's calculated, efficient, clearly motivated evil verses narcissistic, deranged, inconsistent evil.
The reason the latter often feels preferable is it's a devil you can understand. I can analysis the haute-bourgeois and predict their actions with some accuracy, makes them easier to organize against. For all I know my local petty-bourgeois is one citation for improper sewage dumping away from driving an armored bulldozer through my house.
It can be difficult for many to contemplate the sheer evil and depravity of the owner of a chain of car dealerships in Idaho.
While it is helpful to vent, Marxist speaking they are not needed to be evil, the structures and systems mean they fill a role in which they are molded into acting in a way that makes you see them as evil.
Moral categories are not needed, but emotional fulfilling.
I think about this story often:
They called the cops on a disabled guy for playing the trumpet outside their store in the middle of the music district.
I just checked and yelp covered up all the negative reviews the bookstore received after that lol
Can't let "tried to have a man killed 1/5" skew the averages for important shit like "they greeted me upon entering 5/5"
I've mentioned this before but there was a dude busking on a horn years ago outside where I worked and the amount of people that were like "if he put as much energy into finding a job as he did playing that trumpet..." almost made me snap.
He's making music, it's free music, and he's fucking good at it you ungrateful motherfuckers. This is his fucking job and he's doing a great job. I was so goddamn mad.
As I've explained to my co-workers in restaurants before, they're no better morally than any other business owners they're just too egotistical or stupid to just follow the easy money and open a franchise, which makes them more unpredictable and dangerous.
Like you think they wouldn't own large businesses if they could? That remaining small is their goal? Fuck no, your mom and pop store's dream would be to be Wal Mart. They're the capitalists coming near last place and don't deserve your pity any more than another richer capitalist. The exploitation is the same and it's harder to organize against a business where the owner is there every day.
Absolutely. A coworker today relayed their cousins path from coin op carwash owner, to PPP loan multiple car wash owner, to PPP loan apartment owner. Dude’s still actively seeking to acquire more.
Ppb loans
Well yeah because you never meet the shareholders of large corps, theyve delegated the nasty stuff to managers and such.
If I hear one more person talk about "ma and pop landlords" as inherently good against some big landlord corporation homie oh my god
niche indie landlords 
The petit bourgeoisie are the worst because they're not as powerful as the major corpos, but for that reason alone they're more indignant, more annoying, and more fascistic.
And 'support local business' libs have given them this complex that they're a social good and any hardship they face as a business owners real or imagined is a form of martyrdom for the greater social good. The poor small business owner can't afford the new minimum wage proposal and big business will eat up all the smol babies etc. At least big business owners played the game and won, they were out competed in the capitalist market they paricipate in and endorse and want our sympathy for being the smallest predator in the pond and that we ought to believe it's socially constructive to throw ourselves into their mouth because their ego says they should be a shark? Fuck that, let em be the chum to the sharks that already are out there for all I care. The person who owned the hole in the wall vegan restaurant I previously worked at still took time off from.the business she ran over Christmas to be a part time postal worker and deliver mail, cutting out what is a sweet yearly possible entry to an amazing long term union gig as a postal worker if you don't wash out after Christmas and keep up the hours. She also bought rental properties that her husband renovated and then she resold. They're all absolute scum on equal level, they're the ones with any stake in this imaginary competition where they were doomed from the start but lacked the sanity to realize it and unless they offer workers a better deal than the big guy, they can take a fucking hike. They decided to be capitalists, apparently taking the risk is why they deserve to exploit workers so, here's your risk assholes, when you sit down at the table you may go bust.
This is why we got to make a Faustian bargain with the billionaires that we will let them have New Zealand if they help us crush the middle class. One mega yacht is better than a thousand little boats.
What? No. Have you read Faust? It doesn't work out. That's an essential part of your metaphor, you don't deal with the devil cause you'll get fucking screwed. A thousand little boats is way better than the aircraft carriers and battleships our billionaires essentially have at their admittedly less than immediate disposal but I doubt I need to explain the military industrial complex. If we're sticking with a boat metaphor, yeah, sometimes it'd a yacht but that yacht is being protected by an advanced military force as well. I've gone off hard against small business owners enough in this thread I don't feel the need to here, but comparing them is a false exercise as a communist They're the same but on different stratus of power, there is no fundamental difference morally between small or big businesses, they're both our enemy and the only difference to consider is in strategy to destroy them. Otherwise it's a distinction with no difference.
No class collaborationism, that's literally fascist ideology.
we will let them have New Zealand
don't they already own it?
The worst is the next rung up from "small business owner". The guy who might own a few small business and/or some investment properties. Still an ant in the eye of the Amazons of the world, but has vastly more power to victimize a larger number of people.
These are always the most fucking disgusting, pathetic, annoying and cruel people I have met. They brag about all the awful shit they do to people and they get away with it. Rapists, thieves and wife beaters the lot of them, but actually having the money to shield them from any blowback in the way the petty tyrant who just owns like a restaurant or something does not.
I worked for one of these types when I was younger. Truly the most psychotic vile piece of shit but with a good outward image which made it so much more annoying for anybody to believe he was a garbage boss.
While working for him he got diagnosed with some kind of cancer with a small survival rate that he ended up beating somehow. I thought naively at the time that the experience might change his ways, but nope, as soon as he was better he fired or reduced the hours without notice to a whole bunch of people across his businesses.
Quite a radicalising moment tbh.
I worked for a small business last year and experienced wage theft every workday. 
When you're closer to the exploitation, you have to be more dehumanizing to live with the acquisition of profit.
If you can abstract far enough away from your part in exploitation, you don't have to inflict excessive suffering to justify the cruelty of the exploitation itself.
Throw in the fact that small business tyrants want to be millionaires, things get more unpleasant.
Most exploited I ever was was when I worked for a non profit mom and pop theater company. Pay was $5/hr officially but I worked about twenty hours of unpaid overtime every week, so even if you include the hypothetical rent I saved living in the shared accommodation it came out to well below minimum wage for the time (this was 2012ish).
Everyone but me was pretty much sponsored by their parents to be there. I subsisted off of top ramen and mooched food for about six months before realizing that the economics simply were never going to make sense and cut my losses, leaving that job with more debt than I had when I started it.
I would be tempted to say that that's just the nature of the industry and that the people there were doing it for the love of the art form - but I also saw the homes that the owners and their son all lived in, so I'm not tempted to say that at all.
People who work for large corporations have some form of oversight because the bosses always have bosses and there's always some kind of company policy that at least in theory they have to follow and the government is at least in theory somewhat interested in what they do, especially if they're publically traded.
Small business tyrants have none of that oversight, can do whatever they want and treat workers however they want because they're the rulers of their own little fiefdoms. Obviously this also means they start thinking they're hot shit because they OwN A BuSiNeSs and PrOvIdE JoBs.
Large corporations suck in different ways, but my own conclusion is that in this capitalist hellscape the best kind of job would be as some anonymous person in a large corporation, as long as your boss wasn't the micromanaging type (yeah good luck) and corporate bureaucracy didn't care too much about what you do, that'd probably have the least amount of bullshit.
i like how Bryan from street fight would always refer to them as "small business tyrants". some of the worst people on the planet. worst boss/human i ever knew was a "small business" owner.
I can hide in large corps for the most part. When I worked in a small business i couldn't hide at all the fucking CEO would walk into the bathroom banging on the door telling me to get back to work.
Where i work now i can piss about with no real oversight
Working as intended, honestly though.
Target's starting pay is more then most motorcycles dealerships pay the dude that puts brakes on motorcycles... Don't ask how I know that
Yeah, worked for a few small businesses. Those Ma and Pa shops can be fucked. A business owner (or just as bad) his suck-up friend can be lecherous, physically abusive, openly steal your shit.... CEO's at big places are more into social murder when it comes to their workers.
Large corporations can do fucked up things on a mass scale. With small businesses, it's personal
Not every exasperated petty bourgeois could have become Hitler, but a particle of Hitler is lodged in every exasperated petty bourgeois.
I mean, there's a reason the default ideology of the PB is the "Bad One"
I had one actively stealing my checks to make me quit. Guess what I did?
Reported them to the IRS for tax fraud?
That was 2004. Why tax fraud?
I suppose they should be reported for stealing, but tax fraud (not a lawyer but this happened to a friend recently) because if you were employed by them they had to deduct that money, and if they kept your paychecks then they didn't deduct tax money for an employee, and that's lying to the IRS about financial information, which (again, not a lawyer) but sounds a lot like fraud
Small business owners are not necessarily scum, but holy shit, they can be. In my experience, they are 1000 times more likely to actively break the law in order to exploit you. These are the people who would have owned slaves, who would have fought against abolition. These are the people who give the government a kill list with your name on it.
The reason I say not all is because there are some people who just own cafes and bake really nice muffins, which doesn't have to mean the same as owning a dry cleaners and exploiting undocumented workers.
It goes without saying that all landlords are evil by definition though.
I kinda have started wondering if there's a difference between somebody wanting to be "self employed" and somebody wanting to "own a business"...
A whole lot of overlap in that vinn diagram, but there's gotta be a chunk of people who just want to do a thing without having a "boss" and the only way to do that is to "start a business".
For sure, I mean the danger zone begins when you start employing people. Just thinking out loud now, I don't know what the solution is to that, to start a co-op instead? I feel like it isn't totally straightforward because say you do just want to run your own cafe and sell your own cakes that you bake, you put down £100k for the property, pay all the bills, get all the ingredients, and do all the work, then you get someone in to do the dishes, how do you renumerate them fairly? I suppose the solution becomes much more obvious if your cafe was born from the result of some kind of community enterprise rather than your own private accumulation of capital.
This is the correct take
small business orders reminded me of like, this one part from Capital? just mainly like, that capitalist require a certain amount of exploitation just to like not work for themselves eventually?
but like this part!
spoiler
From the treatment of the production of surplus-value, so far, it follows that not every sum of money, or of value, is at pleasure transformable into capital. To effect this transformation, in fact, a certain minimum of money or of exchange-value must be presupposed in the hands of the individual possessor of money or commodities. The minimum of variable capital is the cost price of a single labour-power, employed the whole year through, day in, day out, for the production of surplus-value. If this labourer were in possession of his own means of production, and were satisfied to live as a labourer, he need not work beyond the time necessary for the reproduction of his means of subsistence, say 8 hours a day. He would, besides, only require the means of production sufficient for 8 working-hours. The capitalist, on the other hand, who makes him do, besides these 8 hours, say 4 hours’ surplus-labour, requires an additional sum of money for furnishing the additional means of production. On our supposition, however, he would have to employ two labourers in order to live, on the surplus-value appropriated daily, as well as, and no better than a labourer, i.e., to be able to satisfy his necessary wants. In this case the mere maintenance of life would be the end of his production, not the increase of wealth; but this latter is implied in capitalist production. That he may live only twice as well as an ordinary labourer, and besides turn half of the surplus-value produced into capital, he would have to raise, with the number of labourers, the minimum of the capital advanced 8 times. Of course he can, like his labourer, take to work himself, participate directly in the process of production, but he is then only a hybrid between capitalist and labourer, a “small master.” A certain stage of capitalist production necessitates that the capitalist be able to devote the whole of the time during which he functions as a capitalist, i.e., as personified capital, to the appropriation and therefore control of the labour of others, and to the selling of the products of this labour....
This is especially true with landlords.
At least my corporate landlords have maintenance staff and mostly follow the law. No one I interact with at my corporate owned apartment would personally benefit by my AC not getting fixed, they work 9-5 and just do their jobs.
When I had a small landlord who just owned a condo she rented out, she fucking sucked. Any time something would break she’d try to fix it herself first and it took forever, she didn’t give proper warnings about needing to enter, shit like that.
All my worst employers were these. And they didn't exactly excel at solidarity with covid, but sure expected it from everyone else. The erosion of safety measures was organized loudly by all the small gyms (glorified landlordism) and other such places, at least where I am from.