478 transactions on a trailing 12-month basis is a record. The Kerrigan Blue Sky Index is at 178. Those numbers look great on a chart. What they do not capture is the operational reality inside stores being absorbed into larger groups. Every acquisition that closes creates a transition period where two management cultures, two DMS setups, two sets of vendor relationships, and two compensation structures have to merge. The groups buying aggressively right now are confident in their AI-driven profitability projections and their ability to standardize operations at scale. Some of them are right. Some of them are acquiring stores faster than their integration capacity can absorb.