This article is written for first-time visitors to Saltnfire.net. This is my worldview. It’s a framework I call “Phenomenological Management, Producer Sovereignty” designed to answer one central question: Why do small, independent businesses struggle?
If you read this first, and then explore the Where-to-Start Map Page, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of how the pieces fit together.
[The Two Revolutions of Objective Thought:
From the Factory to the Algorithm]
1. 20th-Century Management: Faster, Cheaper, Easier
The industrial revolution was the triumph of Objective Thought—the belief that everything could be measured, standardized, and optimized. It reduced the sacred art of service into ROI, KPI, the MECE framework, process optimization, big data analysis, and behavioral economics, stripping the ‘Soul’ out of the business to feed the machine of efficiency.
This worked well in a production-and-finance-centered paradigm. In the early 20th century, when manufacturing and services were still underdeveloped, simply making products faster, more convenient, and cheaper was enough to create massive value. Thus, nearly all innovation focused on speed, cost, and convenience.
But everything shifted in the 1990s. As the communist bloc collapsed, countries like China and Vietnam—offering cheap labor—entered the global capitalist market. Manufacturing firms moved factories overseas to continue financial and production-based optimization. Meanwhile, high labor costs in developed economies hollowed out domestic markets.
To stay competitive in the 21st century, industries needed new sources of value. The answer became the Digital Revolution, with the internet at its core.
2. How 21st-Century B2C Business Changed
The digital revolution is the ultimate extension of Objective Thought—still about measuring, standardizing, and optimizing, but now applied to intangible processes: algorithms, data, and networks.
As the marginal value of physical production declined, labor-intensive B2C industries (especially F&B, where I work) underwent three major shifts:
(1) The Explosive Rise of Franchises and Corporations
In the early 1990s, local mom-and-pop stores were still dominant. But giants like McDonald’s, Burger King, Pizza Hut, and Starbucks imported 20th-century management logic into B2C: optimizing processes, standardizing workflows, cutting labor costs, and building global distribution networks.
This wasn’t a coincidence. Nearly every global brand we know today rose in that period. They mastered the art of faster, cheaper, easier—consolidating local markets and converting them into franchise chains.
(2) The Growth of B2C Infrastructure Platforms
You’ve probably heard sayings like: “Cafés compete to death, but coffee bean suppliers never go bankrupt.” Or, “A pasta shop might fail, but DoorDash won’t.”
The point is that in B2C, the businesses that organize and mediate consumption—not the ones directly making food—have captured the real value. Take restaurants: in the past, you could invest $1 to make your food $10 more delicious. Today, with rent and labor costs so high, that same improvement may cost $10 for marginal gain. Platforms, by contrast, run with minimal fixed costs beyond offices and warehouses, but scale almost infinitely.
That’s why opening a delivery platform, IT logistics firm, or wine distribution business is often far easier and more profitable than operating a café or restaurant. Meanwhile, local shops are being reduced to subcontractors, fulfilling orders passed down from platforms or selling platform-supplied products like franchise dealers.
(3) The Branding Wars
As improving product performance (including taste) no longer created enough value, businesses turned to branding. Because branding is an intangible asset, it resists functional evaluation and allows price premiums. This demand for differentiation created an entire industry of marketing theory—Philip Kotler, Jack Trout, Christensen, Chip Heath, Jonah Berger, Malcolm Gladwell—all weighing in.
Branding assumes consumers are passive. It presumes that if you stitch together the right story, polish the surface, and package it to fit the media, people will naturally like it. That’s why companies and universities have poured money into hiring researchers and experts to do exactly that.
The fact that branding once presumed consumers to be passive is closely linked to the nature of the media that delivered brand narratives and imagery. From radio and television to the smartphone, these media formats are fundamentally designed to ‘expose’ content to the consumer. To drive purchases through this exposure, brands had to excite consumers and induce a sense of thrill, which inevitably led to a capital-intensive dopamine race.
Paradoxically, this shift has marginalized small businesses. They can never outperform large corporations in a capital-intensive competition for dopamine. Instead, a small business’s true competitiveness stems from unscientific yet phenomenological elements—such as presence, aura, comfort, and relationships—that create truly meaningful experiences for the customer. This suggests that we need a new approach.
3. The Potential of Phenomenology: Interpreting the World Through Perception
(1) What Is Phenomenology?
I did not major in philosophy as an undergraduate or in graduate school. Therefore, rather than taking a strictly academic approach, I focus on how to practically apply phenomenology to small business.
Phenomenology suspends the claim that “the world is objectively this way.” Instead, it asks: “What does this experience mean to me as it appears?” Or put differently: What does my body feel before my brain tells me what to think?
Neuroscience might say, “You’re excited because certain neurotransmitters fired at certain synapses.” Phenomenology asks instead: “Why does Starbucks feel like barging into someone else’s living room, while chatting with a familiar owner in a corner shop feels comforting?” It is a philosophy that explores why the same act—like drinking coffee—can be structured so differently in perception.
(2) Why Phenomenology Stayed in Literature and Art
Phenomenology pushed back against rationalism—the obsession with breaking everything into objective data and scientific explanations. It saw this as the root cause of the crisis of the humanities and of modern people losing a sense of meaning in life.
The problem: its concepts of perception and lived experience couldn’t be tested in scientific experiments. So phenomenologists leaned on dense logical argumentation. This made their work inaccessible and detached from ordinary life. As a result, phenomenology survived mainly as a backdrop for literature and art, fields that already valued subjective experience and expression through metaphor and imagery. In short, phenomenology remained a language of interpreting life’s meaning, but it never became a technology for surviving life.
But as discussed above, small businesses can no longer survive by competing on the same terms as platforms and large corporations. In this new era, where literary and artistic inspiration has become perhaps the only way for small businesses and independent creators to generate additional profit, it is essential to understand the phenomenological mindset from a pragmatic perspective.
(3) The New Era: Consumption as a Battlefield of Perception
From a branding perspective, how customers experience a ‘special aura’ is a critical element. Large corporations focus on creating ‘simulacra’—hyper-real, fabricated experiences that feel more real than reality itself. However, as this trend intensifies, consumers are suffering from growing fatigue. This is the inevitable outcome of a dopamine mechanism that demands increasingly stronger stimuli to trigger excitement, to the point where even corporations are burdened by skyrocketing marketing costs.
As people begin to perceive existing brands as ‘fake,’ ‘hallucinatory,’ or ‘inauthentic,’ they have come to crave meaningful experiences or lifestyles they can truly immerse themselves in. They now refuse to remain passive ‘spectators’; instead, they seek to reclaim their agency over their lives through their consumption choices. This is the narrow gap where independent businesses can survive. And it is exactly the gap Saltnfire.net seeks to explore.
In short, the essence of phenomenological management lies in creating human-centric and meaningful experiences. While this might be seen as unscientific or mythical thinking, it is precisely why it remains a niche market that large corporations cannot easily penetrate. Furthermore, given that big corporations are inherently aligned with scientific logic, it is genealogically sound for a phenomenological approach to become the core methodology for the philosophy of small business owners.
4. Establishing Producer Sovereignty in a Democratic Welfare State
(1) Why We Must Seek Ways to Escape the Regulations and Taxation of the Democratic Welfare State
Now, let’s move on to the second theme of this blog: Producer Sovereignty. This is a vital philosophy for the survival of small business owners, independent creators, and researchers. In the modern democratic welfare state, sovereignty resides with the ‘laborer.’ However, since laborers sustain their livelihood through contract-based wages or welfare, they are not the group that directly creates added value by investing capital and taking risks. Consequently, the democratic welfare state and the laborers who exercise sovereignty through it tend to ‘plunder’ profits from the producers.
In nations like France or South Korea—where a massive manufacturing base exists and left-leaning labor unions dominate politics—labor rights are constitutionally protected. As a result, the producers’ means of resistance (such as price-fixing or halting production) are asymmetrically blocked. This predatory environment forces producers to either flee abroad or, like me, seek a reactionary philosophy of struggle.
However, the exploitation of producer profits is not applied equally to everyone. A patriarchal democracy exercises power under the pretext of protecting its citizens. Because these governments fear public criticism and scapegoating, they form a symbiotic relationship with large corporations that can serve as a ‘blame shield.’ Major firms, unable to flee due to high asset specificity, remain in the country with guaranteed monopolistic positions; in exchange, they act as ‘pseudo-civil servants’ by taking over the state’s duties in employment, welfare, and taxation.
In contrast, small business owners have their profits squeezed to the point where reinvesting their own capital becomes impossible, leaving them barely at a subsistence level. The state is generous toward those who merely make a living while employing one or two people, but imposes punitive taxation on those who strive for excellence. This is because the public feels sympathy for the struggling petty-bourgeoisie but feels envy toward high-income individual entrepreneurs. Since democracy feeds on envy, it does not leave such success unchecked.
There is also an administrative challenge. These individuals wield significant local influence, but as natural persons, they refuse to act as a ‘blame shield’ for the state. Thus, the state attempts to confine them by forcing their conversion into ‘corporations’ to shift social responsibility onto them. This is why the law, which was so harsh on individual entrepreneurs, suddenly offers ‘sweet benefits’ once they incorporate. In short, to survive as an individual entrepreneur, one must find a way to escape the grasp of the democratic welfare state.
(2) Selling at a Higher Price vs. Building a Better Product
The democratic welfare state is a system where sovereignty is divided into 1/n shares. From the perspective of a capitalistic production system, this necessitates mass-producing goods faster and in larger quantities to supply the entire populace. Consequently, technological innovation is geared toward lowering marginal costs to zero for the ‘masses with average purchasing power,’ rather than catering to a ‘select elite with high purchasing power.’ Once basic performance reaches an acceptable baseline, quality improvement plateaus, and all efforts are diverted into manufacturing process innovation. Marketing theorists often refer to this as ‘commoditization.’ From that point on, the dominant strategy becomes ‘selling at a higher price’ by wrapping products in branding to stimulate desire. Replacement cycles shorten, material quality and durability decline, and while trivial features are added, genuine innovation that satisfies a ‘refined connoisseurship’ disappears.
The problem is that this model of manufacturing and sales favors large corporations while putting small-scale producers at a severe disadvantage. Small producers primarily invest their own capital and have technical skills ’embodied’ within themselves. Therefore, their superior strategy is to specialize in their field to produce higher-quality goods at lower costs, thereby enhancing their comparative advantage. However, the moment they abandon this to focus on ‘selling at a higher price,’ they discard their built-up comparative advantage, leading to a drastic loss in resource allocation efficiency.
It has become a trend for small businesses to mimic large firms by sourcing goods from OEMs, and then investing heavily in ‘label swapping’ and marketing. While this might circulate cash, it builds no lasting archive of value. This approach causes a brand to lose its ‘time leverage,’ eventually leading to its exit from the industry.
In conclusion, individual entrepreneurs should not focus on selling for more, but on making it better—first satisfying those with refined tastes before gradually expanding into the mass market. To execute this, one must understand politics and economics through the lens of the Austrian School, which will be the primary research theme for 2026-27.
6. Conclusion
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7. Contact information
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