Small businesses can rarely pay a living wage. And there are a lot of them. So many of them in fact, that their inability to pay living wages actually suppresses the average wages. Large corporations will (sometimes) pay more, but the floor is so low due to the economic non-viability of most small businesses that they don’t have to pay much more than a living wage.
Small businesses are touted as a way to fight back against corporations, yet their continued existence lowers the value of labor as a whole in the market. If capitalists really believe in “the free hand of the market” they will agree that any small business that can’t afford to pay its workers a wage they need to survive SHOULD close. We need to stop giving our money and labor as charity to the petite bourgeois if we want this dynamic to change