"Despite popular belief to the contrary, entrepreneurship in the United States is dying. It has been since before the Great Recession of 2008, and the negative trend in American entrepreneurship has been accelerated by the Covid pandemic. New firms are being started at a slower rate, are employing fewer workers, and are being formed disproportionately in just a few major cities in the U.S. At the same time, large chains are opening more locations....

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"While playing hooky from a conference in Boston a few years back, three former colleagues from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management hopped in a car and headed on a road trip. They pulled into a shoe store in Maine and noticed that the sales help was unusually pushy. After a few questions, they discovered the store had a "secret shopper" program, in which employees would be marked down if they were not sufficiently aggressive with customers....