That kinda stuff is why I'm an incrementalist, as opposed to "Great Man" theories of civilization. A big impressive product or leap-forward is mostly luck and thousands of cascading preconditions on small improvements everywhere else, and often not even the first person to try.

It's not hard to imagine that if a fundamentally similar store today that took the world by storm, there would be a profusion of news stories asserting that the founder is a genius visionary, with nary a peep for Clarence Saunders et al.