Here is a market that every major grocery chain in America has known about for forty years and mostly declined to serve properly.

Not out of malice. Out of structure.

A national chain builds a standardized assortment optimized across thousands of stores. That assortment is designed for an average customer, and an average is not a person.

So when a neighborhood has specific food traditions, specific ingredients, specific cuts of meat, specific produce varieties and a preference for shopping in a particular way, the national chain gives it an aisle.

One aisle. Labeled by region.

Meanwhile a family in Anaheim opened a small market that treated those customers as the entire business rather than as a section.

That became dozens of large stores across Southern California, and the strategy behind it is one of the clearest examples of how you beat a much larger competitor.

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