In and ideal world, a business could just sell products and services with little attention to anything else. Unfortunately, businesses can have a profound effect on society. Businesses can empower a people, or enslave them.
Businesses can spur growth or stifle it.
Businesses make the quality of life better, or make it worse. Businesses can do all of these things, because every thought to buy a product or use a service has to be made my another individual called a customer. Customers are what make your business run, and so every business becomes a people business. Happy customers might not make a business extremely profitable, but unhappy customers can definitely put your business in the red. America has this great thing called capitalism, which results in competition.