Every retailer that got big had the same instinct.
One store works, so open a second. That works, open twenty. Then two hundred. Then go public, raise money, and open two thousand.
Growth is the assumption underneath nearly all of American retail, and the companies that followed it are mostly either enormous or dead.
There is a store in the Chicago suburbs that had the same option and declined it.
One location. A very large one, but one. For decades.
It sells appliances, electronics and furniture, categories that national chains and online giants dominate completely.
And it is still family owned, still profitable, and still there.
The refusal to expand is not a failure of ambition. It is the mechanism that makes everything else possible.