New England is full of businesses that should have expanded and did not.
Outdoor outfitters, hardware stores, department stores, grocers, furniture makers and a long list of specialty retailers, many of them a century old, most of them operating within a few hours of where they started.
The conventional reading is that they lacked ambition, or capital, or the management to scale.
Occasionally that is true. More often the restraint was deliberate, and the businesses that expanded aggressively are the ones no longer here.
This is the last piece in a long look at American regional retail, and the region makes the argument more clearly than anywhere else.