In 1974 a man opened a small grocery store on Devon Avenue in Chicago.
He was not chasing a market opportunity. He was solving a problem. He could not find the ingredients he grew up with.
Neither could anybody else he knew.
That store is now the anchor of the largest Indian grocery chain in the United States, with locations across dozens of states.
And it got there using a strategy that no business school teaches and no site selection model produces.
It followed people.
Not demographics on a spreadsheet. Actual people, moving to actual places, for actual reasons.
That sounds sentimental. It is in fact one of the most precise expansion strategies in American retail, and it beat every algorithm that tried to compete with it.
Here is how it works.