Fifteen years ago, everyone agreed on what was about to happen.
Online retail would take over. Physical stores would empty out. The giant supercenter, with its enormous parking lot and its twenty aisles of things you did not come for, was a relic waiting to be cleared away.
Some of that happened. Plenty of chains died. The department store barely exists in the form it once did.
Gif by BikeDiscount on Giphy
But the giant grocery-and-everything-else store did not die. In a lot of places it got stronger.
And the reason is one of the better business reversals of the last decade.
The thing that was supposed to make the big store obsolete, its size and its location near where people live, turned out to be the hardest asset to replicate in all of retail.
A warehouse three miles from your house is worth an enormous amount. It just took everyone a while to notice they already had thousands of them.