For about twenty years, the story of small town American retail was a story of closures.
The department store anchor left. Then the discount chain filed for bankruptcy and closed hundreds of locations at once. Then another one did.
What got left behind was a specific thing. A large empty building, usually on the edge of town, with a parking lot, loading docks, and nobody to fill it.
Those buildings sat empty for years in a lot of places. Some still are.
And a retailer from Marshall, Minnesota looked at that landscape and saw something different from what everybody else saw.
Not a graveyard. An inventory of cheap, ready made stores in towns that had just lost their only option.
That is one of the more elegant growth strategies in American retail, and it is worth understanding, because the logic applies far beyond stores.