Many small businesses of past years were family built, or single owner who worked hard to create a great product, and became successful because of that hard work.
And, the owners sell out after years and years of good product. The "new" owner -
usually a big corporation - just adds it to it's portfolio and the chain-line production lowers the quality to zilch.
Now, it's so difficult for a NEW small business to compete, it can't. So we get very few small business start-ups today, and will get less in the future. It has become about "small price" instead of small business. Very tragic.