Walk into a sporting goods store in Memphis and you will find a wall of Dallas Cowboys merchandise.
Memphis is four hundred fifty miles from Dallas.
That wall is not a mistake. It is a national buying plan, executed correctly, arriving in a city that does not want it.
Rally House built a company out of that gap.
It has more than three hundred stores and, by its own description, each one carries merchandise “customized and tailored to the specific collegiate and professional teams in that area.”
Which sounds like the most obvious idea in retail.
It is also the single most expensive thing a chain can do, and the reason almost nobody does it.