For about a hundred years, American retail had one instruction.
Build bigger.
Bigger stores held more merchandise. More merchandise meant more selection. More selection meant customers drove past the small store to reach the big one.
That logic built the department store, the supercenter and the mall.
And then it stopped working, quietly, over about fifteen years, and most of the industry took another decade to admit it.
Now there is a chain in Charlotte, North Carolina doing something that would have sounded like surrender in 1995.
It is building smaller stores on purpose.
Not closing stores. Not shrinking because it has to. Opening new ones in a deliberately compact format.
That is a genuinely interesting bet, and the reasoning behind it explains almost everything about where retail is heading.
Here is the math.