There are four mattress stores at one intersection and none of them has a customer in it.
You have driven past this. Everyone has. It is the single most common "how is that a business" observation in America, and it usually comes with a conspiracy theory attached.
Money laundering, people say. It has to be.
It is not. The truth is stranger and considerably more instructive.
The empty store is not a symptom of failure. For this specific product, in this specific category, an empty store can be an extremely good business.
Gif by MattressFirm on Giphy
Because a mattress store is not trying to have customers in it. It is trying to have four customers a day who each spend $1,400 at a margin that would make a grocery chain weep.
Compare that to a coffee shop that needs four hundred transactions a day at $5 to survive.
Same street. Same rent. Completely different arithmetic.
And once you see the arithmetic, the four stores at one intersection stop looking absurd and start looking inevitable.