The tactic, practiced by major national
retail chains such as
Blockbustervideo and
Starbucks coffee of drawing on their vast
corporate resources to descend upon an area and open up enough stores to saturate the market, even to the point where there are so many locations that individual ones aren't even profitable, in order to drive out any competing operations, especially independent 'mom and pop' scale ones. Then once the competition is driven into
bankruptcy by the inability to draw sufficient business, the chains have obtained near
monopoly status and they begin closing locations to make the operation as a whole obscenely profitable.
The community suffers by losing its local businesses, and is now faced with monopolies in the video and coffee markets, and of course a bunch of vacant storefronts where the redundant chain locations were closed. But hey, it's all fair in a 'free market.'