Yeah wholesome mom and pop businesses getting eaten by larger, more specialized and efficient corpos is not a bug, it’s an inherent feature of capitalism. A worker at a specialized firm can manage dozens of apartments for the same salary as your aunt managing just one or two- she stands no chance in the long run. Same for retail stores and most other kinds of businesses really.

The only solution is democracy- having the larger more efficient firm be democratically owned by its workers and accountable to them and through them the community, rather to a cigar chomping investor hundreds of miles away

No, not all investment is the same. look up the difference between rent and profit.

Steam deck: am I a joke to you