I'm primarily coming from the experience of running a professional consignment business with high end bike stuff on eBay, shopify, and local. By all measures I was as successful as one can be in that situation, but the numbers are just not viable as a business due to all the businesses taking a disproportionate cut of transactions relative to the time and risk they create. For instance, PayPal is an unregulated bank that charges four times regulated banking transaction rates. eBay has not updated their systems and fees to match their bare bones operations and appropriately handle scammers when a seller has a perfect record and six figure sales numbers. In grass roots business, the smallest transactions are by far the most important. In the USA there is essentially a $5-$10 minimum shipping scam that prevents most small business models from being viable. China subsidizes logistics for these types of businesses and they have a thriving grassroots entrepreneurial market with a global footprint. Small transactions are the most critical for local business. Amazon has absolutely destroyed local retail because of the inept mismanagement of USPS at the critical bottom end of transactions. Then there are banks for the individual or business. They are also predatory and devaluing currency by several percent. On a platform like eBay, discovery can be gamed, and that is what their cut buys but it is not worth a quarter of the transaction, especially when that transaction is thousands of dollars. Add uninsured shipping to that and you are sitting right at 40% margin in fees to others under the best case scenario. Shipping insurance is quite literally an open scam. Getting anything out of them will take more time than working a minimum wage job for the same amount of money. It is a criminal scam regardless of which one you choose. With traditional keystone margin, that leaves you 10% for your time. It just isn’t viable, and that assumes you are able to source traditional keystone goods to sell. In most cases now, the margin is even less with distributors taking a bigger cut. I did the eBay thing after I got the broken neck and back. Prior, I was the Buyer for a chain of 3 bike shops. So I know the business and back end. The eBay side is not even minimum wage for the time spent, and is one damaged package away from failure at all times. Amazon, by comparison is a monolith that uses the illusion of sellers for a price fixing scam. They aggregate all inventory. There is no structured correlation between the product you list and the sale made in their system. If you list the product and ship it yourself, all you are effectively doing is setting the price for them to undercut themselves. If you are the sole source, your product will never get exposure to real views unless you pay to advertise it, and there is no regulatory validity to this extortion mechanism. The same is true of Google’s and Microsoft’s web crawler results. It does not matter who is serving results, all services are querying one or both of these, and it is these results that are not deterministic. As a grassroots business, you have no path of honest discovery, and every aspect of business is extorted by a thousand cuts. It is simply not a viable option. You can learn it the hard way if you’d like. Local retail space is way way too expensive for any digital business model to succeed, and the world has moved on to far more competitively priced Chinese goods that are not hampered by the exorbitant bottom end logistics and digital markets scams. For a disabled person like me, that is not viable, but is is one of the only mechanisms where I should have participatory access. In more broad strokes, the entire US consumer retail market is exploitive and abusive from the back end perspective of a professional Buyer. The big box stores are all rogue distributors participating in the retail market directly. This is why the market is consolidated and impenetrable by small businesses. New products and innovation is irrelevant. The state of technology and goods available do not meaningfully evolve because anyone that tries is unable to get into a market without the patronage of some elite benefactor. These are the fuckwits of inherited wealth, so meritocratic value is irrelevant. The world of the present is therefore a criminally aligned system of thieves, cronyism, and nepotism. There are no honest scales in the public forum, and all the sellers are issuing shaved currency. That fails even Hammurabi’s code. To me, an informed public is one element, but is mostly more idealistic. The local market participation and lack of an honest free market is a much larger issue in how I view the present. When I got hurt, I was holding the business together, and I mean empirically, not through a lens of self aggrandizement. We were about to open a 4th store, like rented the space, building the walls, and painting the place. Money was stretched, but I had the relationships to make it work despite defaulting accounts in the red zone. Without me, it took two months before the owners parted ways, accounts dropped, the fourth store was abandoned and accounts never really recovered. I was a shell and in no shape to return, so I did the e-commerce thing. I had all the overburden of that whole mess to offload, plus all the consignments I could pull through the shops. I have a knack for learning markets in depth where I know the items on the edges that people are looking for but unable to find. When a high end part is “not serviceable”, I pop a video on YT of how it goes together or comes apart, and start selling the parts out of the bins of spares taken off and replaced at the shops. So I am literally the only source for the items and can charge anything I want. While my inventory is free to initially explore the market. So I sold stuff like that and high end bikes. That kind of bottom end is where, in a just and fair free market, innovation should produce value, but it does not. Innovation is instead punished by a failure mode that has no recourse, and few people understand. Like you walk into one of my shops and see all the $2k-$14k bikes and are wowed. Great that is the point, and I will happily sell you one, but what you do not know is that what you see on the floor is nearly all I have of that kind of bike. Meanwhile, under your feet, on the floor under the shop, I have around 2k bikes in boxes and nearly all of them are the low end stuff you will actually purchase. As a Buyer, that low end stuff is what I stress about, and bike tubes, and socks. I am spending a fortune in preseason orders and I only care about the bottom end because the rest is easy to liquidate at cost. The bottom end is everything in retail, and that is what is inaccessible in the USA. In terms of stuff like the TSA, I care about actions. The action is that they are working and unpaid. Until this last year, I wouldn’t have said I thought ObL was meaningfully successful, but with ICE, Flock, Venezuela, Iran, the Epstein files, the million or so homeless in prisons for being disabled, elderly, or unwell, the lack of unbiased media sources, and the way we own nothing now? Yeah, I do not recognize this place any more. There is a vector connecting ObL and all of those elements. At least in terms of political narratives, that one has some teeth IMO.