A lot of small businesses really can't pay more. They've been on shitloads of life support from the American government / American imperialism for who even knows how long. They get squeezed by labor at one end and big business (which supplies them with the shit they resell) at the other end. They're really very fragile and collapse the moment anything goes wrong. Also, their owners tend to be the most unbearable fucking human beings on the planet who have no idea how to even conceive of, much less handle this problem.