Grocery is a scale business.
Everybody in the industry says it. Buy more, pay less, sell cheaper, buy more again.
Dorothy Lane Market has three stores.
Not three hundred. Three. Two in Montgomery County, Ohio, one up the road in Springboro. It has been that size for a long time, in a metro area that has barely added people since your grandchildren were born.
By the usual rules, that grocer should be gone.
It is not gone. It is the store people in Dayton name when they want to sound like they know food.
The short answer is that Dorothy Lane never tried to win on price. The longer answer is buried in federal establishment counts and Census population files, and it is more interesting than the short one.
That is where this starts.