Here is a business nobody wants.
A grocery store in a town of three thousand people. The population has been flat or falling for twenty years. The median age keeps rising. The young people leave for the city and mostly do not come back.
Your customers have limited budgets. Your margins are two percent on a good year. Your delivery truck drives a long way to reach you.
And there is no competitor, because nobody else wants this either.
That last part sounds like good news and it is the whole problem. When you are the only store in town, you are not protected. You are responsible.
If you close, the town has no grocery store.
So how does a company build a business out of dozens of these, in a state where the distances are enormous and the towns are small?