&gt; But it also falls most heavily on smaller businesses, which cannot afford staffs of pricey compliance specialists to make sure that their desk chairs meet the new California workplace seating requirements. This may help explain why the number of firms is falling, and markets are consolidating.<p>The inefficiency with which small businesses deal with regulatory compliance is just one example of a general phenomenon. Small businesses are inefficient at pretty much everything. For example, there is no way cab companies, the largest of which may have a few hundred drivers, could ever deploy the kind of software infrastructure Uber has developed. Mom-and-pops can never compete with Amazon&#x27;s or Wal-Mart&#x27;s integrated and unified systems for warehousing, picking, shipping, and logistics. As technology makes it easier to manage increasingly-large enterprises and unlocks economies of scale, consolidation will continue apace, with or without the impact of regulatory compliance.<p>At the end of the day, someone has to make sure workers aren&#x27;t being abused by being forced to work for more hours than they are paid for. As long we consider that a legitimate burden we put on businesses, we have to face the fact that the relative difficulty of compliance is just one of the many disadvantages of being small.