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

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jrm4 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, 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.

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Retinal7467 an hour ago | parent [-]

You’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.

	▲	integralid an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		GGP started with "There isn’t a single business in existence" though.
	▲	freedomben an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I think you misread. The GGP post did not differentiate by small or large, nor did GP

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const_cast 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I 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.

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dingnuts 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

spoken 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

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i80and 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

As 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 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Splitting hairs. At the time your friend owned it, the company and people were one and the same.

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nemomarx 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I 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 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		A 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.

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acdha 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I 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.