For as long as people have met and gathered in small villages, in larger cities, at religious events or along travel routes, for shorter or longer periods of time, people have engaged in trading goods – the forerunner of today's retailing. Hence, retail is an economic sector with a long history (Stobart & Howard, 2019). Most early retail took place in town centres, establishing the relationship between trade and urban agglomeration (Coleman, 2006). A general rule has been that retail is located where the customers are (May, 1989), owing to the economic potential of proximity to larger consumer markets. This is true not only for retailing, but for almost all economic activities in liberal markets (Scott, 1998), and the general trend is a drainage of investments, companies and people in sparsely populated rural and peripheral localities in favour of urban agglomerations (Lindgren et al., 2017), at least when it comes to physical retailing, which is the focus of this chapter.