Here is a thing that happened over the last forty years and nobody framed it correctly.
A long list of American grocery chains disappeared. Bought, merged, bankrupted, liquidated, converted.
The standard explanation is that big beat small. Walmart arrived, then the warehouse clubs, then the discounters, and the regional chains could not compete on price.
That explanation is mostly wrong.
Look at which chains actually died and a different pattern appears. An enormous share of them were carrying debt from an acquisition or a leveraged buyout.
They did not lose to Walmart. They lost to their interest payments.
Which brings us to a grocer in Sunbury, Pennsylvania that has spent a century doing something almost nobody in this industry does.
It does not borrow money.
That sounds like a small conservative preference. It is actually the entire explanation for why the company still exists.