Drive out past where the subdivisions end.
Past the last chain restaurant, past the high school, to where the lots get big and people have a few acres and a barn that may or may not hold an actual animal.
There is a store out there. Big metal building, enormous parking lot with room for trucks and trailers, pallets of feed stacked outside.
Inside is a combination that makes no sense until it does. Chicken feed. Work boots. Fence posts. Dog food in fifty pound bags. Trailer hitches. Heat lamps. Baby chicks in a tub, in spring, actually chirping.
That store is one of the most quietly successful retail businesses in America, and it got there by deliberately refusing to serve most people.
Which is the opposite of what retail is supposed to do. Let us find out why it works.
