Like farming land, some patches of retail were just barren, would yield no crop

Like farming land, some patches of retail were just barren, would yield no crop. Other patches, perhaps very close, were fertile ground. Nobody could tell you why definitely. If you had selling in your blood, from generations, you could tell whether a site for a shop would work or not, as a farmer could tell good land from barren by picking up a fistful and sniffing it. It might be just the way that sun hit the front of your shop in the morning. It might be on the road that people naturally walked down to to get to the tube station, and preferably on the other side of the road to their path, so they would  get a good look at your shop rather than walking straight past it, head down.

P. Hensher, The Emperor Waltz  (2014), 147