The Mom and Pop Menace

You fell in love with the warm aesthetic of that diner, but then you got food poisoning.

You were amped to try that cafe on your vacation, but surprise — mid espresso.

Thinking you were doing the right thing by supporting local, you went to that craft fair, only to discover cheap Alibaba beads strung together with what suspiciously resembled cat fur.

It's always been like this.

Nothing has changed.

We've romanticized small operations into almost mythical status. In doing so, we've gained a collective blind spot.

Sometimes the little guy is the problem.

Don’t worry — it’s not your fault. How could it be?

Small business worship is baked into your cultural DNA.

We talk about bending over backward for small businesses while hitting "Add to cart" on Amazon. And politicians weaponize this cognitive dissonance, like a perfect rhetorical shield.

Right now, Trump claims to champion local businesses while crushing them with tariffs. And don’t forget about the recent House Republican budget proposal promising to help “Main Street” while actually increasing national debt, cutting taxes primarily for the wealthy, and slashing Medicare/Medicaid that many small business owners rely on.

Invoke the holy name of “the little guy” and you’re absolved for your sins, especially as a politician.

Now I promise you — this is not an attack on small groups and businesses; this is a wake-up call.

Take off the rose-colored glasses blinding you from this reality.

The rhetorical power of "mom and pop" isn't just a love language; it's a spell cast to blind us.

But today, we break that spell with three case studies.

As Alfred Hitchcock once said: "There's no terror in the bang. Only the anticipation of it."

1) Breaking Small: America’s Deadliest Drug Crisis

If you didn’t know already, fentanyl kills over 60,000 Americans annually. Almost all of it comes across our southern border.

Contrary to Trump’s campaign rhetoric, however, bombing cartels wouldn’t stop the flow.

It’d be like trying to bomb every coffee shop out of a hipster neighborhood. They're too small and too numerous.

Yes, the Sinaloa and Jalisco Cartels are at the heart of the crisis, but they've built something wildly effective: a decentralized supply network. They source precursors from Chinese chemical companies then delegate final production to small "pill mills".

These are operations run by just 1-3 people in random apartments and warehouses along the border.

These mom-and-pop drug labs process the final product, while American citizens handle nearly all of the actual smuggling. Unlike terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda that the U.S. hunted down ₍🦅🇺🇸 🦅_), this is a distributed threat.

A game of endless whack-a-mole.

The "Breaking Bad" model has scaled into one of America's deadliest crises, showing how small operations collectively cause catastrophic damage.

They don't appear on corporate filings. They have no organizational charts. They scatter their cash flow around the world.

They’re nearly impossible to track or terminate effectively.

2) Backyard Chainsaw Massacre: How Small Ranchers Are Destroying the Amazon

The Amazon forest _(jungle?) made the news recently after the city of Belem announced “a new four-lane highway cutting through tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest for the COP30 climate.”

But who's actually chopping down the Amazon?

By and large, small landholders.

An estimated 90% of deforested land in the Amazon is used for cattle grazing.

These small landholders clear 50-200 acre plots illegally for fattening up and then selling their cattle to large meatpacking chains.

These aren't massive agribusiness corporations with boardrooms and shareholders out there chopping down trees.

Each individual operation seems insignificant, on the surface, but multiply it by thousands, and you get planetary-scale devastation.

Here’s the good news: there are solutions.

Paul Rosolie's Jungle Keepers are trying innovative approaches by paying loggers to protect Amazon forest, offsetting what they would've earned from clearing the land.

It also turns out that Brazil’s political leadership matters. Deforestation dropped by nearly 31% in 2024 compared to 2023 under President Lula.

This whole time, we’re hiding behind the comforting narrative that "75% of all emissions are due to corporations,” when it’s really tons and tons of individuals responding to economic incentives and, in the consumer’s case, buying what they want.

Small scale ≠ small impact when thousands of actors follow similar patterns.

3) The Lawn Chair Blockade: How Suburban Crusaders Halt National Progress

It’s not just about small businesses; it’s about the impact of individuals organizing.

Here’s a curveball for you: individual homeowners can act as small-scale blockers of progress.

You, me, your friend, your neighbor, your grandpa with nothing else to do.

We aren't experiencing some vague "housing crisis". We're suffering a housing shortage. And contrary to popular narratives, the main culprits aren't Airbnb, BlackRock, or greedy landlords.

The cities with the most expensive housing all suffer from one thing: lack of housing supply.

So the solution? Build baby build. Grow that pie!

Most of these cities are where they are now with housing because people who bought houses when they were plentiful decided to weaponize local government to ensure no more housing (multi-family, apartments, condos, what have you) could be built.

These aren’t evil corporations making it illegal to build apartments, granny units (ADUs) in your backyard, or even add an extra floor to your house.

They're ordinary individuals abusing local veto power and taking housing progress hostage based on a misunderstanding of supply and demand.

We romanticize local control and "neighborhood character" while these mom-and-pop obstruction operations create housing crises and even block climate solutions.

The most effective NIMBYs (not-in-my-backyward) aren't secret cabals of the ultra wealthy — they're determined homeowners who show up to every meeting, file endless legal challenges, and leverage local political connections to block the construction of housing, which would lower rents and allow for new generations to raise their families in the neighborhood.

These aren't the villains we want, but they're the villains we have lol.

Community meetings ≠ successful democracy. Instead, they're where the already-comfortable ensure their comfort remains undisturbed.

Just as politicians abuse the terms “little guy” or “small business”, thousands of Boomers, Millenials, and even Gen-Zers rally under the cry of “gentrification.”

In reality, they’re keeping the prices in their zone artificially high by

Demonizing the construction of housing as terrible “gentrification” has brought us to where we are today: a massive housing shortage in our most popular, high-demand cities.

The economic impact is staggering; trillions in lost economic productivity, skyrocketing housing costs, and delayed clean energy infrastructure.

Thankfully, there are cities like Seattle and Austin that are building housing:

Writers Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have gone viral recently with their book “Abundance” by showing how America’s inability to build new things and focus on obstructing progress is holding back our national prosperity.

The Invisible Hand of Small Catastrophes

These ‘mom and pop’ operations bubble up in unexpected ways, and governments and cartels putting their fingers on the scale exacerbates these distributed problems.

Our nostalgia and cultural bias toward "small is good" has blinded us to this reality.

We hide behind misleading talking points like "100 companies cause 71% of all green house gas emissions” while ignoring how our individual choices collectively drive those corporate behaviors.

What other "mom & pop" myths are we buying into? The family farm illusion? The myth of local business environmental superiority?

Don’t get me wrong — I always go to my local cafes _{(love me a latte)} and shop around locally. The solution is NOT to demonize small operations, but to see them clearly, without the distorting lens of cultural mythos.

Sometimes the greatest threat isn't the giant corporation but the collective impact of millions of small actors pursuing their interest.

If you’re keen to see more, refer one friend and get access to the Mom and Pop Hall of Shame 🏆

Thanks for taking the Pack,

Zach

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_{The vibe-killer disclaimer: The opinions in this post and all other posts only represent myself and do not represent the opinions of my employer or any groups I am a member of.
This is not financial advice or recommendation for any investment. The Content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.}

Disclaimer: This is not financial advice or recommendation for any investment. The Content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.