Two buildings, half a mile apart.
One is a supermarket. Sixty thousand square feet. Forty thousand different products. A bakery, a pharmacy, a deli, a floral department and a guy whose entire job is misting the lettuce. Two hundred employees. Millions of dollars of inventory.
The other is a box with eight parking spaces, a cooler wall, a coffee station and two people working.
Ask a hundred people which one is the better business and ninety nine will say the supermarket.
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They are frequently wrong.
The supermarket is one of the lowest margin businesses in the entire American economy. Net margins in grocery are famously thin, often in the low single digits, and sometimes lower than that. It is a business that moves a mountain of product to earn a pile of pennies.
The little box makes more money per square foot, per employee, and per dollar of inventory than the giant ever will.