Every day, I see another “Quickie Mart”, etc., going up. Just how much can the market support? Do they really do market studies before opening another franchise? It’s nuts! Heck, some are even a block apart. What’s the point? Does the parent co. care?
Just off the top of my head…
Well, it’s a franchise, and all parent companies run their franchisees differently. McDonalds, I believe, requires all kinds of careful planning before they’ll allow another McDonalds to be opened in a town. OTOH, I’m sure there are franchises that don’t really care–if you’ve got the bucks to invest in a storefront, they’ll say “sure” and hand over the blueprints.
Since I hardly ever see a convenience store close up for lack of business, I’m guessing that yeah, somebody somewhere must do some planning, at some level.
And I doubt whether the ones that are “a block apart” are the same franchise, yes? It’s probably that one’s a 7-11 and one’s a White Hen Pantry, or something like that.
Or maybe if you look at them, you’ll realize that one store is on a busy intersection that goes one direction, and the other store, due to access difficulties, like maybe a weirdo intersection configuration, is poised to catch the shoppers going the other direction.
I would guess that the market for convenience stores is far from saturated–after all, that’s what people are paying for, is “convenience”, and in American culture, you can never have too much “convenience”. The two stores that are a block apart are serving two different ends of the neighborhood there, with two different sets of people who want to drive the absolutely shortest possible distance between their house and the store.
Like Duck Duck says, commuter traffic patterns will often dictate store locations; this has led to the phenomenom of Starbucks’ across the street from one another.