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Save your loyalty for people that matter in your actual life. There isn’t a single business in existence that cares about you. Even companies in the business o
by makingstuffs 1y ago
Save your loyalty for people that matter in your actual life.
There isn’t a single business in existence that cares about you. Even companies in the business of keeping you alive will only do so while doing so makes them a profit.
I say this as the example of the local handyman is one where you will matter more. It’s a human relationship with a real person not a fake relationship with one person and a spreadsheet
- dingnuts 1y agospoken like someone who has never been a regular at a small business. there are all kinds of benefits when you get to know the guy who owns you favorite pizza shop for instance
- nemomarx 1y agoI think that falls under a real relationship with a specific person. You can definitely have those, but a larger Corp isn't going to let employees do that very much
- Jensson 1y agoA small business owner has much more control over it than a local manager in a big corporation does so there are more benefits to becoming friends with them. That doesn't happen with large companies since there is no singular "owner" in public companies, even the CEO has to listen to the profit demands of the investors.
- acdha 1y agoI think the key aspect here is scale: if the person making the decision knows the people affected, you usually see a pattern of different results than without that human connection. Large companies tend to be bad both from isolation and because the frontline people increasingly are not allowed to make decisions or consulted or even known by the people who are.
- i80and 1y agoAs a good friend of a restaurant owner I have personal experience with this and you're friends with the people, not the company. Restaurant owner friend transferred his company to new ownership, and I would never ask for the kinds of goodies the previous owner gave me. Because it was the owner, not the company, with which I had a relationship.
- mikeg8 1y agoSplitting hairs. At the time your friend owned it, the company and people were one and the same.
- makingstuffs 1y agoThat’s a very strange and long reaching assumption to make from a post which literally said a local trader is more likely to care for you. Reading aye…
- leptons 1y agoYou get it. Being a regular at my local sushi place (once a week typically), they would always give me free extra stuff, and stuff that wasn't on the menu for free. The chefs would also try out new (delicious) dishes on me. Why would I ever go anywhere else?? That's loyalty to a business. I recommend them to everyone.
- jrm4 1y agoYeah, this is dead wrong. I'll go in the other direction. With a few exceptions, it is unfortunately true that "a business" isn't just "a way to make money," it's VERY OFTEN "the only reasonable way to accomplish a big-ish goal involving multiple people." I say this as someone who started a business incidentally, my father had a big project that he and I loved the idea of, and I knew I could put together a good team to do the web part of it, and so I did. Money was NOT the primary motivator.
- Retinal7467 1y agoYou’re conflating small business and large business. The moment you have investors return on investment becomes the sole motivating factor and whatever humanity the organization had will be slowly squeezed out from the top down. This isn’t ideological, it is a legal principle. A corporation taking actions that harm returns opens them up to lawsuits. Edit: worker owned coops don’t have this issue because they are definitionally managed from the bottom up. Additional edit: the “you” in my post is doing heavy lifting I mean both the post I replied to and the one directly above it.
- freedomben 1y agoI think you misread. The GGP post did not differentiate by small or large, nor did GP
- Retinal7467 1y agoHi, thank you for your comment. I have clarified that I was responding to both of the parent posts.
- integralid 1y agoGGP started with "There isn’t a single business in existence" though.
- Retinal7467 1y agoHi, thank you for your comment. I have clarified that I was responding to both of the parent posts.
- const_cast 1y agoI have some loyalty in open source project I rely on and I regularly donate to them, particularly KDE and thunderbird. Maybe loyalty is the wrong word - if they really go to left field, I would abandon them. But I have a lot of faith in their design decisions and overall vision. Their software works, continues to work, and has always worked amazingly for me. I also feel the same way about Firefox but donating to Firefox isn't like donating to thunderbird.