There is a grocery chain in the West that does five things every retail consultant would tell you not to do.
It does not take credit cards.
It makes you bag your own groceries.
It has no loyalty card, so it collects almost nothing about you.
It charges no membership fee, unlike the warehouse clubs it competes with.
And it spends almost nothing on advertising.
Gif by WinCoFoods on Giphy
Every single one of those is a refusal. And every single one of those refusals is a price cut hiding in plain sight.
The result is a store that regularly beats the warehouse clubs on price without charging you sixty dollars a year for the privilege of walking in.
This is the cleanest business story in this entire series, because there is no clever trick. There is only arithmetic, applied honestly, by a company with nobody to impress.