Your comment makes me think of this recent post, https://laurenleek.substack.com/p/the-basket-and-the-booza, from an always wonderful blog which looks at why Australia has far more independent stores left compared to English cities and comes to a surprising conclusion:

"The unifying claim is this: chains follow legibility. A city becomes legible to a site-selection algorithm when it has been organised into walkable, transit-connected high streets with predictable pedestrian volumes. That legibility is what good urbanism produces and simultaneously what makes a city capturable."