It's almost like you could describe the physical store as the means of production so what we're talking about is the worker's relationship to the means of production.

You might say: but what abou the owners? Many such small businesses are just jobs you buy. Many don't survive when the owners don't move on or the business sells for what's a relatively low price given the turnover.

I'll give you another real world example of this distortion: NYC"s so-called "zombie stores" [1].

I keep thinking about a statement made by Xi Jinping in 2016: houses are for living, not for speculation [2]. Many China critics liked to point to the Evergrand collapse as some gotcha but what really happened is that the CCP intentionally just popped the real estate bubble, taking the position that affordable housing was more important than inventor returns.

Why do I bring up housing? Because as intentional policy decisions increase the cost of construction, it also makes commercial real estate more expensive. Even if you ignore the increased construction cost, every commercial space becomes more expensive because it's an opportunity cost to not build housing there in a speculative market.

Increased rent and increased property costs are an input into everything you buy and are killing the businesses people seem to like and the so-called "third spaces" a lot of people talk about.

And why? Because a plurality of Americans (if not an outright majority) see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" [3] and future real estate moguls.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/06/nyregion/pharmacies-vacan...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...

[3]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/328134-john-steinbeck-once-...

Fixing retail with land value capture