The little guy with insight can defeat financial titans in the free market. A successful business will scale to such a point where it can often be hard to pivot quickly. They don’t have time to compete with an upstart monopolising on the changes in demand. Mail order houses were no longer as desired during and after the urbanisation of American society. Their decades of success blinded Montgomery Ward and Sears to the changes occurring around them. By 1920 tens of millions had been lost between them - they had to pay attention when it hit their bottom-line. Under socialism, the shift would have happened all the same, but the incentives to make the painful adjustments would have been missing - the citizens would have borne the cost.