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.