What?

By investing in large businesses, you are investing in large scale commerce and its style of thinking. You give rise to the formation of chains, takeovers of one large corporation by another, and other practices that you can only understand if you look at how it makes money.

There are enough scandalous examples of large corporations that loose their ethics when they have no fear of being caught. There are plenty of companies where worker's jobs become a daily nuisance because the companies strip themselves, just to be able to sell the company with a big profit in a year or so.

Large companies increasingly optimise for big money, and are less concerned with the interests of customers or employees. This makes it better to turn your business to small companies.

Why?

A standard case that more and more people know from their direct environment, is the so-called hedge fund. A company that runs properly is bought by such a fund, whose only goal is to make a big profit quickly. To achieve this, the apparent profits from a company should be enlarged, so that the stock price shoots up and allow a sale with lots of profit. Agressive as this may be, it is still legal.

A hedge fund will promise a leader of a company a large bonus if a certain profit figure is achieved. To this effect, the leader (who has actually become a follower) strips anything from the company that it could possibly do without, rules are applied with more vigour if that brings more profit, and so on. If customers don't see this because they are being helped by grumpy employees, then they are likely to see it because the service drops to a level which is only just legally acceptable.

This style of thinking only works when aiming for short-term sale. Both employee and customer are more favoured by long-term thinking, so this is a bad development.

It is known that large corporations lobby actively to get their wishes turnt into laws. Not in the interest of a country or its citizens, but in the interest of that company. The only resistence that we have against that, is the spine of the average politician. Sigh.

An example of this style of working relates to seed companies, that buy crops from a country, get them patented and then use those to squueze money out of the inhabitants of the companies that originally supplied the seeds. Such companies also fight for genetic manipulation laws, claiming that humanity needs it to feed itself. This leads to bizarre products like "golden rice", which fortifies itself with vitamin A. But if anything is easy to find in natural plants, it is precisely that vitamin! A bit of diversification in food is much more useful than an expensive type of rice that molests nature's wonderful products.

Crocodile tears are cried when the food industry fights for sterilisation. As a result, raw milk is practically impossible to get in America, and other countries tend to follow. Who ever drank raw milk knows how much better it tastes. It also happens to be much more healthy than the sterilised or pasteurised form, and it can be safely produced with what we know of hygiene nowadays, but only on a small scale. Big industrial thinking therefore wants to introduce sterilisation laws, to discourage small-scale milk production.

Hardly anyone remembers it nowadays, but hemp is a versatile and useful crop, that has been outbanned by political manipulation. The variety with THC, a drug, used to be smoked for medicinale reasons, supported by doctors. A variety of hemp with hardly any THC provides strong fibers that could be an environmentally better replacement for cotton. The pulp of the plant yields paper in a much more efficient way than trees. But it is this property that sealed the plant's faith -- as the paper industry in America felt hemp to be a threat. So they started a smearing campaign through the befriended newspaper industry. The American government placed a ban on Marihuana before realising that this was just the Mexican name of the useful hemp plant. Today, large sums are invested in fighting this useful and versatile crop. But at least the interests of the paper industry have been saved...

Large corporations are prone to cause damage, and their motivation is always money, and only money. The strongest argument to stop them being harmful is to vote with your money: By entrusting it to small companies you avoid that your money collects to a powerful instrument that does more harm than good. Unchain yourself by buying locally!

How?

It is not difficult to unchain yourself, so to stop being a customer of chains. We may think we are dependent on large chains, but we are not.

Look at the forms of companies that you tend to purchase from. Are their shares traded on the stock market? Then they are prone to takeovers and hedge funds. Most legal systems have another form, where the shares remain under control of the company itself. Or forms where nobody speaks of shares, but just of a company being run by its owner.

Obvious chains are the brand that you find throughout your country, or even throughout the world. They are part of the list of chains you could seek to avoid. The closer to your home your products are made, the better they are. Visit a local dairy farmer, subscribe to a vegetable subscription of a local organic farmer, buy at your local farmer's market. And skip the supermarket whenever you have a chance.

Where?

A few books are filled with many more details than given above:

• The revolution will not be microwaved by Sandor Katz, ISBN 1-933392-11-8.
• The omnivore's dilemma by Michael Pollan, ISBM 0143038583.