Kmart

Kmart had a strong discount concept and 250 stores with $800 million in sales by 1967, but it ignored small towns and borrowed its parent's warehouses, leaving cost discipline and logistics weak. Walmart copied it, owned its distribution, and grew unnoticed for about ten years, passing Sears by 1990 while Kmart went bankrupt in 2002. Lesson: neglected niches and in-house core infrastructure beat a first-mover's head start.