Drive across the American West and you will pass through a lot of nothing.
Not empty exactly. Just long. Sixty miles between towns. An hour where the only structures are fences and a radio tower.
And then, on a highway interchange with a town of four thousand people nearby, a large, bright, busy store with twenty fuel pumps and a parking lot full of trucks.
That looks like a mistake. Who builds something that big out here?
It is not a mistake. It is one of the most carefully calculated decisions in American retail, and the calculation has almost nothing to do with how many people live nearby.
It has to do with how many people drive past.
Once you understand the difference between those two numbers, the entire map of highway retail makes sense.