Levinson shows that, because A. & P. invested in its own warehouse-and-delivery system, it was able to improve inventory management, which is essential for any retailer. While its competitors were taking four months to turn over their inventory, A. & P. was doing it in five weeks. Walmart, similarly, invested heavily in making its supply chain more efficient, and it was directly responsible for a sizable portion of the productivity boom of the nineties. It’s harder for small businesses to innovate in these ways, particularly when credit is tight, as it is now. More important, most small businesses aren’t necessarily interested in expanding or innovating. A recent study by the economists Erik Hurst and Benjamin Pugsley shows that only a tiny fraction of small-business owners have any interest in becoming big-business owners, or even in bringing a new idea to market. Most are people who simply want to run a small company, do work they enjoy, and have some control over their own financial lives.
Those are admirable goals, but they’re not going to make companies more productive. And that matters, because greater productivity is the main driver of long-term economic growth and higher living standards. Because big companies are more productive, they offer workers, on average, better wages and benefits—or, as in the case of Walmart, they offer consumers significantly lower prices. And the impact of these things on living standards is not trivial. It’s hardly a coincidence that in the decades after the Second World War, when ordinary American workers became part of the middle class, very big companies employed a huge percentage of the workforce: in the early seventies, one in five non-farm workers worked for a Fortune 500 company. Small may be beautiful. It’s just not all that prosperous.
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