THE REAL FOOD -Fresh Organics upheaval in Noe Valley probably won't be the biggest business story of the year, but it's starting to look as if it might be one of the most illuminating. The neighborhood's strong reaction to the late-August closure of the store and the mass dismissal of its staff suggests that Noe Valley, for all the socioeconomic changes it has endured since the mid 1990s, is still a cohesive neighborhood that supports local business and resists, or at least is skeptical of, chains owned by faraway corporations. You can read about the anxiety at noevalley.blogspot.com.

It is worth asking ourselves from time to time why this sort of skepticism is important – on what philosophical basis it rests. Big corporations do bring some benefits, after all. A single-minded pursuit of market share and profit conduces to a certain rationality in management; if extending health benefits to same-sex domestic partners, say, is found to enhance employee stability and productivity, those benefits will be extended. Big Bay Area companies have been taking steps like these for a number of years and by doing so have helped give legitimacy to human arrangements that a generation ago were not part of the ordinary social landscape.

But while corporate rationality sometimes produces humane results, it is not itself humane. The business ethos is in fact reptilian, as Thomas Lewis et al so vividly argue in A General Theory of Love. Business can extend mercies to people if doing so will help make money, but it just as easily – and far more often – treats people with indifference or cruelty if it is economically advantageous to do so. Hence: layoffs, which always seem to be cheered by stock markets for representing "reductions in operating expenses" or greater "efficiency." "Increases in productivity" are always celebrated on evening business telecasts, as if the phrase did not mean human workers displaced by machines and everybody else toiling in breathless dread that they will be next.

Corporations by their nature do not recognize any value other than money. Yet there are other values, such as community and consensus, that cannot be entered on any balance sheet but are essential – indeed central – to any good life. The rich man who, near the end of his days, reviews his life and sees nothing but an expanse of money and regret has been a staple of human storytelling for millennia.

It is too soon to say that the supplanting of the Real Food Company by Fresh Organics will be a grief. But the sudden dismissal of the entire staff is a dark portent, as is the neighborhood's palpable unease. People know a Starbucks when they see one.