Drive down Main Street in any small town in Colorado. Count the empty storefronts. Now take the access road — the one lined with chain stores, some of them rebranded because one corporation bought the other. The cycle that killed Main Street is hiding in plain sight, and most Americans are funding it with every paycheck.
Americans hold $48.1 trillion in retirement assets. The largest share sits in equity funds — stocks of publicly traded corporations whose growth strategy includes buying the competition. Every 401(k) contribution is a bet on corporate consolidation. That consolidation is strangling Main Street.
A single big-box store moves onto the access road and the damage spreads in every direction. The grocery store down the street loses customers first. Then the pharmacy, the garden center, the bookstore, the gas station — because the big box does all of it under one roof.
Convenience wins. One store replaces five, and five storefronts go dark.
The Federal Trade Commission flagged serial acquisitions as a major antitrust concern, warning that firms buying competitors in the same business line may violate antitrust law. But the money keeps flowing one direction: out of paychecks, into index funds, into the corporations that build on the access road and undercut what’s left on Main Street until it closes.
The numbers get worse every year. The SBA’s Q1 2025 Economic Bulletin confirmed that business closures have increased steadily for a decade. Small business employment fell in mid-2024 — only the second quarterly drop since COVID.
An estimated 15,000 brick-and-mortar stores closed in 2025 — more than double the year before. Macy’s is closing 150 locations. Walgreens is cutting 1,200. Party City shut all 700 overnight.
The chains on the access road are consuming each other. Meanwhile, everybody says shop local.
Then government steps in to save Main Street. Taxes go up. Grants flow to nonprofits — $303 billion annually, according to IRS Form 990 data compiled by Candid. The country now has 1.54 million 501(c)(3) organizations.
These entities pay no income tax, often avoid property tax, and operate under different regulations than the businesses next door that do. Congress recognized the problem in 1950, creating the Unrelated Business Income Tax specifically because nonprofits were competing with taxpaying businesses. Seventy-five years later, the Government Accountability Office still calls for better data on the competition between tax-exempt and for-profit businesses. The Tax Foundation puts the nonprofit economy at $3.3 trillion and growing.
Chaffee County, Colorado, shows what this looks like at the local level. Population: 20,000. IRS records show 432 registered tax-exempt entities in the county.
The county gives $200,000 a year to its Economic Development Corporation, which subsidizes new businesses through programs like the Ascent Accelerator — in direct competition with existing, tax-paying businesses whose own taxes fund the subsidies. Chaffee County business owner Vince Phillips documented the full pattern in his recent HCA opinion piece: “The commissioners through EDC are picking winners and losers.”
The county budget reached $75 million in 2024 — nearly triple what it was nine years earlier. Population grew less than two percent per year over that same period.
The question nobody has answered: has the EDC ever counted the businesses driven out by the competition it created — and subtracted those losses from the 36 new jobs it claimed?
The cycle is self-reinforcing. Each stage feeds the next, and the tax base shrinks at every turn.
The access road gets another chain. Main Street gets another empty window. The budget grows to cover the gap.
Nobody designed it this way. Nobody had to.
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