I literally cringe whenever people are criticized for being anti-business, as was the case, for example, when Amazon decided to not expand in New York City, because of concerns regarding the adverse impact that might have on the people who call Queens their home. How dare we think of people, when we all know that profit is the master we must serve.
Both my father and my maternal grandfather were small business owners — a pharmacist and a butcher, respectively, whose corner stores were at the opposite ends of the same street in a working class, Sicilian section of Buffalo, New York.
Each of them had a sense of community and an awareness that their success relied on the service and honesty they provided. They were pro-customer and pro-community. Grandpa, for example, refused to fire the highly irksome man who worked for him because the man “had a family to support.” And, when the man passed away, grandpa made certain his family had meat to eat, and loaned money to the man’s sons so they could go to college. Grandpa did that because he was pro-community.
My father’s tiny drug store had a license to sell beer, a vestigial remnant of prohibition, when only drug stores could sell liquor. There was a sober, hardworking customer who each night would come in to buy a quart of Ballantine Ale, which he and his wife shared with dinner.
He was the only one who bought quart bottles of that brew, yet my father made sure there was always a cold bottle waiting for him — because that was good customer service. And, there were numerous times that parents who were temporarily out of work were told not to worry about paying for their child’s prescription medicine, until they were financially able to do so.
That was in the days before neighborhood stores were forced out of business by ironically “anti-business corporations,” with no sense of community or of place. Where my father and grandfather cared about their customers, corporations that thrive in the “free market” economic swamp care only about their stockholders, while demanding that we be pro-business as they kick us to the curb.
We are pro-business if we tell corporations it is OK they do not pay taxes; that it is OK for them to pollute the environment; that it is OK to deny employees the right to democracy in the workplace through the process of collective bargaining; that it is OK to deny health care to people in order for insurance and drug companies to make huge profits; that it is OK to move even profitable plants to low -age areas in order for them to make more profits; and that it is OK for corporations to dictate how schools are run and what and how subjects are to be taught.
There is something terribly wrong with this picture.
Jim Palermo
Southampton