Everybody understands how a restaurant grows. You open another one.
Grocery does not work that way, and the reason is one of the more interesting pieces of business mechanics nobody explains.
A supermarket cannot be supplied the way a restaurant can. It carries tens of thousands of items, a large share of which are perishable, arriving on a schedule that cannot slip.
That requires a distribution center.
And a distribution center is a very large fixed cost that makes no sense at all until you have enough stores to fill the trucks.
So growing a grocery chain is not a smooth process of adding locations. It is a series of cliffs.
A company in upstate New York went from one store to roughly a hundred and thirty across New York and New England, and the shape of that growth is dictated almost entirely by warehouse economics.