While BFE stores may not be the busiest, we have a couple in our area that do 3 to 4k per week since there isn't any other option. It'll also take Amazon longer to take over these areas. One of the biggest things is suppose to be same day delivery and while I could be wrong I don't think Amazon could do that in BFE. Someone correct me if that's not true.
Well, Deerfield didn't go into BFE for a long time, and that really was around the urban focus. They left the outer areas to Eckerd's, Thrifty's, Rite-Aid, and RevCo (I have an internal very off-color history of Rite-Aid and RevCo as their ownership was what doomed both corporations). CRW only expanded out there when they couldn't in the urban areas as the cost to expand and maintain are much higher. I agree, now that they are there, they will be hard to kill directly, if only for the fact that those parts of rural America are dying anyway. Basically, every year, Deerfield would get a report from the USPS on which post offices they wanted to close and then make adjustments accordingly into the expansion strategy.
But taking your comparison to hyperbole, Amazon need not win the rural areas, but they can take the high margin sales away from Walgreens and CVS. What drugs are both just-in-time and are high-margin from the reports? And Walgreens lives and dies by the DoD-VA contract for TriCare/Heritage. One of the reasons why Walgreens expanded out there was to compete with CVS/Caremark for the rural veterans. So, it just doesn't look like a great future for retail in general, especially for high margin items. I think businesses like Aldi (just-in-time value pricing) or a business that plays into middle class aspirations (Starbucks used to be an example, I'm not sure what it is anymore as I don't have those tastes, possibly fast casual) can work at scale and luxury items still work on a small-scale basis. If you have a business that intentionally is marginally driven yet defines their core as something as broad as retail merchandising, then it will be harder if you are a category or a non-value sort of business. It's not like the American people are going to have more money in their future. Insecurity dampens purchasing, and purchasing right now is broadly based on debt financing.
You only can win if you don't play the game. I don't think any job is safe in the future in healthcare or anything else, thus I subscribe to the belief that a job is a means to diversified earnings end with both active and passive income streams as you don't know when those end. That's why I encourage all my pharmacy students to try marry up (or at least within the same earnings class), because they only get one chance at it, and you have no idea when that cache prunes up. I found that as you can rent pretty and safe at reasonable rates per hour should that be your entertainment (and in certain companies, it's an expensed perk). Same with pharmacy, make your money, but loyalty, what's that worth? Can you eat it? Even with passive income where there is risk, it does diversify everything such that you are not exposed to the life and death of any one particular problem, but on the other hand, it limits your ability to deal with a singular problem because you have so much in the air. The choices we have.
