I agree with the point that markets are often defined by legal and operational systems — how contracts work, how labor is regulated, how payments and compliance function. That’s exactly why country or jurisdiction boundaries sometimes matter a lot.
Where I think we’re talking past each other is the Home Depot / McDonald’s examples.
Those are low-involvement, highly standardized, commodity-style businesses. Their products, pricing logic, and purchasing situations are intentionally broad. In that world, a white-collar worker in NYC and a small business owner in suburban Texas can absolutely be treated as “the same market” for many decisions, because the offer is designed to ignore sharp differences.
The article isn’t arguing against that. It’s explicitly about sharper products — especially startups, B2B tools, workflow software, education, compliance-heavy or behavior-changing products — where the purchasing situation narrows quickly.
In those cases, what matters isn’t whether two people can physically buy the same thing, but whether the same offer survives the same constraints and produces the same outcome. Authority to buy, risk tolerance, institutional expectations, and default alternatives diverge much faster there, even within the same legal system.
So yes, commodity retail is a valid counterexample — but it’s also a special case. The failure pattern the article is pointing at shows up when teams implicitly assume their product behaves like a Big Mac or a box of nails, when in reality it behaves more like a change in how work, learning, or decision-making happens.
That mismatch is where “same country = same market” becomes dangerous