Most American businesses do not make it to their fiftieth birthday.
A small fraction reach a hundred. A much smaller fraction reach a hundred while still owned and run by descendants of the person who started it.
There is a chain in the New York area that opened as a hardware store in Brooklyn in 1909 and is now in its fourth generation of family management.
It sells appliances and electronics, a category that has destroyed an extraordinary number of retailers.
Circuit City is gone. RadioShack is a memory. Sears, which once defined American appliance retail, collapsed almost completely.
The Brooklyn hardware store is still operating, with dozens of locations across the region.
The question worth asking is not how it got big. It is why it did not die when everything around it did.