People take road trips to a grocery store.
Not to a city that happens to have one. To the store. It is the destination. They drive two hours, they take photographs, they buy souvenirs, and some of them pay to park.
There is an animatronic display. There is a bathroom that people specifically recommend, which is a sentence I did not expect to write twice in my life. There are tens of thousands of products from a hundred countries, an enormous beer selection, and a hot sauce aisle that functions as a landmark.
It is a supermarket that became a tourist attraction, and it happened on purpose.
Now here is the part that makes it a business story rather than a novelty.
Turning a grocery store into a destination is not a marketing decision. It is a completely different economic model wearing a supermarket's clothes.