Free coffee. All day. No purchase required.
Free popcorn too, from a machine near the front, smelling exactly like you would expect.
And in spring, live baby chicks in bins, which children will stand and watch for twenty minutes while their parents shop.
This is a farm supply store in the Midwest, and none of those things sound like a retail strategy.
They are the retail strategy.
Because the chain is competing against a much larger national competitor in the same category, and it is not going to win on price or purchasing power.
It wins by being somewhere people go, rather than somewhere people are forced to go.