The small shopkeeper

When trying to avoid John McPhee's somewhat slow book about Alaska -- in retrospect someone as meandering as McPhee is ill-suited to a topic as large as Alaska -- I've been reading a book of stories by Lee Smith: Me and My Baby View the Eclipse, which was published in 1990.

I have yet to read something by her that I don't like. None of it is blow your mind great, but all of it is good and always humane. As much as anything, this set of stories of longing, broken homes and resilience in the strip malls and apartment complexes of late 20th century North Carolina make me think back to the tragedy of the roll-up, the fact that it has gotten harder and harder for anyone to own and run a small business in America. Smith's malls of 30 years ago are interspersed with chains and independently-owned stores in a way that's unfeasible today, when everything is corporate. The psychic cost of this loss is written all over Smith's characters here, women whose husbands have left them because, in one way or another, they're not holding their own.

I continue to view this as an underappreciated precondition of Trumpism. The hollowing out of small towns.

There was a lot of small business formation in the early days of the pandemic. Most of it was related to e-commerce of one sort, we have to assume. I wonder how long those businesses have persisted.

In aggregate larger corporations make for greater productivity and efficiency. But costs are imposed.