Lots of things have happened that have ultimately harmed these small communities.
A major problem is consolidation. A small town hardware store may have had access to multiple suppliers at one point. Those all merged together and ultimately started raising their prices in a "go away" sense to small time purchasers. That's made it incredibly hard to be a store. A big box store gets a lot more foot traffic and has more leverage against distributers which allows them to ultimately outprice a small time store.
My hometown went through this. As a kid, it had a restaurant, a grocery store, a hardware store, and an automobile repair shop. 1 by 1 those all died. The restaurant died because the community never ate there. It became a thing where you'd literally call the owner the night before so they could prepare you a meal the next day. Otherwise they had no traffic. They were too expensive for my small town so nobody would buy a lunch there. The grocery store and hardware store died from being priced out. At one point, just to keep the shelves stocked the owner literally had to buy products from Walmart to sell at the store. No distributor would sell to them.
I think to tease out the core of the problem with large businesses, capital, and society (esp. as regards the dissolution of small businesses), you need to autopsy the concepts of value and liquidity.
Money is meant to be a store of value, 'value' in this case being literally anyone considers valuable. However, it's an abstraction that doesn't quite fit over the thing it attempts to abstract - it really only captures that value if the value is something that is easy to transact. You might value a good conversation with your local grocer, or the smile you get when you pass someone you recognize in your neighborhood, but those things are left out of the money equation. Things the abstraction captures well - transactions of goods, legal representation, contracts, and lobbyists - are all of a particular stripe. Many of these are related to a projection of will; the ability to make things happen the way you want in spite of potentially mitigating factors.
One of the things that money allows is exploitation. Because of the delta between actual value and the abstraction of value, one is capable of strategically manouvering such that they capture more of the abstraction than a straight value:value transaction would warrant. This is compounded when you get tricky with laws and litigation and contracts - hard edges in the problem space become anvils you can use to hammer things to a shape that you like. Cynical strategies are quite successful here.
It is my belief that due to the recursively self-reinforcing nature of this system, it is bound to fail eventually. Because the leaks in the abstraction of value are actually a boon to some few powerful entities, the rules that govern the abstraction will fail to change and adapt and at some point the whole system becomes too heavy to support itself. As a whole, the system will eventually eat it's way to a heart attack.
Liquidity is the velocity of this process, and thus the velocity of consumption. There are pressures and systems and factors that metabolize the effects of the flow of capital, but the higher liquidity is the more burdened those systems become. We are currently in a place where the liquidity factor is > 1, by which I mean money can be spent before it is earned and most of it is (we have something like 5-20x debt to the pool of money, depending on how you measure it). This means that those deficiencies in the abstraction are accelerated and compounded by the same amount, which translates to an equal difference between the things we actually value as humans and the things we are capable of valuing as economic units.
A major problem is consolidation. A small town hardware store may have had access to multiple suppliers at one point. Those all merged together and ultimately started raising their prices in a "go away" sense to small time purchasers. That's made it incredibly hard to be a store. A big box store gets a lot more foot traffic and has more leverage against distributers which allows them to ultimately outprice a small time store.
My hometown went through this. As a kid, it had a restaurant, a grocery store, a hardware store, and an automobile repair shop. 1 by 1 those all died. The restaurant died because the community never ate there. It became a thing where you'd literally call the owner the night before so they could prepare you a meal the next day. Otherwise they had no traffic. They were too expensive for my small town so nobody would buy a lunch there. The grocery store and hardware store died from being priced out. At one point, just to keep the shelves stocked the owner literally had to buy products from Walmart to sell at the store. No distributor would sell to them.