This is crazy... but if you'll entertain the idea for a moment: not everyone who operates a business or sells product/services do it out of profit driven motive

This is crazy... but if you'll entertain the idea for a moment: not everyone who operates a business or sells product/services do it out of profit driven motives. Sometimes, people enjoy the lifestyle of their work and provide a product/service that people want/need/will love pay for. Their business may not be unique, they may not offer optimal prices. Sure, these folks can very likely be undercut because it's unlikely that by these goals alone they're running an optimal process to reduce costs or have the capital to scale things up to points they can attain cost saving advantages. This means their value proposition would be fairly weak. That's fine. People still want honey and maybe they like Mark or Barry or whomever and would rather pay a little bit extra to make sure their local bee keeper is able eat and continue to contribute to their community. One unique value proposition does come to mind however for many of these local artisan style businesses: these people are less likely to abandon small communities. Pure businesses focused on profit motives alone will leave when the situation become unprofitable. People like Mike and Barry are more likely to stay as long as their lifestyle can be maintained. They may even have children who want to continue the family business as is (or not). There are plenty of examples where Walmart, for example, saw opportunities in small rural communities, swept in, undercut the competition and then for one reason or another found it would be best to close the store leaving a vacuum of needs to be met: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/when-wal-mart-leaves-small-towns-behind https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/when-wal-mart-leaves-small... Sometimes the local businesses can rebound but often those local vendors aren't interested in being burned twice. Life is not always about offering the best value proposition. Constantly worrying about optimization in every aspect of life will make you pretty miserable (at least from my experience). At some point you have to choose happy over optimal and understand that's a respectable goal.