But I think that, for example, AXD didn't choose their particular market because they're good at it . . . they became good at it because that was the type of school that they were best fitted to expanding to, they ended up expanding to that type of school fairly often, and THEN decided to focus on it. The whole "niche" perpetuates itself.
Also, I think a more accurate comparison would be to the world of sports . . . let's say the Yankees are akin to Chi Omega, and so on down the line until you get to the Twins and the Tigers, which are Sigma Delta Tau and Theta Phi Alpha. The Yankees are always going to win the World Series because they have more money to spend. And Chi O is almost always going to win out over TPA at the more prestigious schools. That's why other professional sports have salary caps . . . to even out the playing field and make it so every team has a more or less equal chance at winning the championship.
The difference between the KMart/Walmart analogy and that of the NBA is that in basketball, all the teams are trying to help each other stay in business, whereas the stores are actively trying to put each other out of business. And I think the NPC is more like the NBA than it is like the world of commerce, because we do want all the other organizations to succeed (although generally we want them to succeed a little bit less than our own organization
).
Personally, I feel that unless SOMETHING is done, pretty soon the smaller NPC sororities will start to die off. Although I'm not sure if expansion caps are the best way to do it, or what WOULD be the best way to do it if they're not, it's pretty clear something does need to be done or we could start losing TPA, SDT, AEPhi and other smaller groups.
This is a really interesting subject.