Americans are too stupid to realize they could own a gas station

Probably shouldn't say this but I actually personally know and once had some business dealings with some of the O.G. immigrants who started the mass takeover of convenience stores in Notheast by Indian and Lebanese immigrants, respectively.

Both of them had essentially the same business model: they cam over as young men with a small amount of money by American standards, but enough to make a down-payment on either a house or a business. This was way back in like the 1980s or 1990s smth.

This was an era when supermarkets and bog-box stores were devouring tons of market-share of small local groceries and corner stores. The mom-and-pops in dense urban neighborhoods were getting snapped up and rebranded by national and regional C-store chains, but the more suburban/rural locations were available for a song, because the owners getting ready to retire had kids who were in film school or law school or something, with no interest in spending their life behind a cash-register.

So these immigrant guys would put a down payment on the local corner store in some random town, sleep on a cot in the back room, and sit in front of the cash register for 16 hours a day selling cigarettes and scratch-tickets until they could pay off the mortgage, then bring over some cousin or nephew as a sort of replacement, while they rolled the money over into buying another store. It's like a franchise/indentured-servitude system for extended family, where you spend 10 years living on a cot in the back room, and then you can pay it off and afford to bring over your family and buy a house or another store. Each of these guys now 100s of locations run by extended family or friends of friends, and is a sort of Godfather figure, in their communities.

And it's correct that Americans don't generally want to fill these roles. Finding a sober, intelligent, competent American 20-something who wants to commit to spending the next 5-10 years working 16-hour days, 7 days a week, with no vacation, and living off of food they can microwave in the store, with essentially no other wage than eating food from the walk-in and a place to put an air-mattress in back...there are places in the world where that sounds like a dream opportunity, if the end result is that your store is yours, and the income can buy a house or another store like it. But those places are not generally in America.