National distribution in the U.S. is an immense affair. Beyond the expense of advertising in local markets, it took the intensive development of several layers

National distribution in the U.S. is an immense affair. Beyond the expense of advertising in local markets, it took the intensive development of several layers of massive infrastructure projects before we've arrived at today's level of "effortless" distribution. The principle problem is that the United States has no domestic East-West waterway option. No matter how good your rail and road shipping system is (and the U.S. has among the best in the world for freight), you can fit a lot of train's worth of goods into a single big container ship. Rail also only gets you so far, as you need local trucking links, large inter-modal warehouses and so-on. What really happened was the rise of the trucking industry in the late 70s and early 80s coinciding with the rise of big-box stores like Walmart. This built all of the secondary and tertiary infrastructure -- and capacity -- to move whatever stuff you wanted wherever you wanted, pretty cheaply. However, there's also two major East-West barriers in the U.S., the Mississippi river, which has largely been overcome but was a major geographic barrier in an earlier age, and the Rockies, which both involve a large energy cost to get over, but also have unreliable roads in certain areas during large parts of the year. Many many large brands exist only on one side of their respective barriers or the other. Yuengling beers for example, more or less don't go any further than the Mississippi, while Dreyers ice cream more or less go no further than the Western Rockies.