[NoelJacob]

You can still live comfortably without depending on private (I meant large private) entities in Kerala. Also there are supermarket chains but they haven't overtaken normal non-chain grocery supermarkets. Not even close. Of the top of my head I can list three chains near me and most of my household lives without needing to buy from them and just going to regular stores.

Edit: To add to it. In Italy, you eat pasta for lunch. To buy cheap pasta you go to Pam/Conad/Carrefour/Aldi/Lidl supermarket chain and buy Pam/Conad/Adli/Lidl branded ones as usually they are the cheapest buy vary in quality. But here getting cheap Rice, for lunch, is different. In Italy, to buy basic milk you do the same and probably the cheap whole fat one is branded by the supermarket. Here, you go to the diary, which gets from a collection of local farmers. To buy eggs, you don't go buy supermarket branded eggs, you could pay someone in your neighborhood with animals to supply. I've never seen supermarket branded eggs until I reached the west to be honest.

[zozbot234]

The dirty little secret is that mom-and-pop stores are extremely inefficient compared to big chain businesses. A big business is also a lot more likely to actually pay taxes to the government, and it still manages to beat the mom-and-pop store on efficiency even after accounting for that!

[NoelJacob]

Yes, they are efficient, obviously as economies of scale. Add in consulting and quants and they'll rise in profitability. But the problem is decision making power lies in hands of select few. When you are a too large a corporate, you basically have no oversight over how much you can optimize in exchange for ill social effects. All corporates had humble beginnings, and over time hyper optimization for profits creep in. Maybe in the beginning, the synthetic preservative they add to optimize profits, was below the threshold, but over the years as need for profit and 'growth' grows and, managements and mindsets change, they could very well go above the threshold and, being big now be profitable enough even after they were caught and they had to deal with the repercussions. Well why would a rational actor not squeeze every dollar out of the customer when they can still be profitable even when accounting for the money they could pay as repercussions for fraud? I'm not saying mom-and-pop are defenders of righteousness or smth, but just from watching the news I can say I trust them over corporates, because they are A) are scared of law as they have more to loose as a percentage of what they have than INDIVIDUALS in the corporate B) feel better moral, idk attitude?, towards the customer, mostly and COMPARATIVELY than the corps. Of the top of my head, I think, cooperatives might be the current best solution or some decentralized frameworks/systems for stores considering efficiency vs power concentration.

> pay taxes to the government

Here, at their turnover local stores are exempt from income tax