some how its evil that walmart puts people out of business but when the smaller companies do the same thing to other small companies its just business
I'm not sure where you get your ideas about retailing, but on a micro level, I can assure you that the opposite is true. I worked in the furniture industry from 1983 til 2005 (with occasional small breaks), the majority of the time for very small, entrepreneurial concerns employing fewer than fifteen people. By their very nature, such companies have an inherent fragility about them, but for me the benefits of being part of a small team and having my voice heard (and responded to) far outweighed any risk of needing to find a new job.
These companies sell what's not available anywhere else, and therefore command a higher price due to very limited quantities both manufactured and sold. They also offer a level of service that is simply unavailable in larger chains. Much like their counterparts in the apparel industry, these are
boutique sales environments. And much like clothing boutiques, they are frequently found in very close proximity to each other, forming districts which act as magnets for the larger populations which they serve.
These are not all necessarily high-end, either; I worked for several years for a small, two-store chain with a central location in W Massachusetts and another (where I worked) located in a cluster of similar shops in Cambridge, MA. Their bread-and-butter was inexpensive RTA (knockdown) veneered furniture made primarily in Denmark. The expensive rosewood executive suites were primarily used as display for catalog sales (a much smaller portion of the business due to lead times and pricing). Like all retailers everywhere we followed the good/better/best paradigm.
The sense of a magnet district increased the desirability of its location; other stores sold their goods, we sold ours. "Competition" as such was largely irrelevant: the greater the pool of retailers, the larger to pool of perspective customers. This seat-of-your-pants retailing is actually much more responsive to customers' needs than big-box types that purchase by the container a season or two in advance.
The issue isn't one of complementing such magnet districts so much as supplanting them. This not just kills smaller businesses but denies the customer base that responsiveness I spoke of in the paragraph above as well as a vastly diminished choice. Instead of the traditional good/better/best paradigm, the customer gets good and that's about it. It takes an extremely focused and exigent customer base to insist on higher quality when it means lengthy lead times and inevitably higher prices, and those markets are increasingly rare, because customers are trained to accept a banal expedient over a much more unusual exceptional.
The internet both helps and hurts in this regard, BTW. On the one hand, the internet can afford a highly knowledgeable customer choices previously unavailable in certain markets. On the other, it hurts brick-and-mortar retailers (with the huge overheads of real estate, staff, and inventory) when someone can view something, get professional-sales level information on a product, then shop online for the best price via merchants whose only overhead is a server, an internet connection and the ability to have a manufacturer/importer drop ship directly to the customer.
