Originally Posted by
grayloon
I can take you to a half dozen of those kind of stores, all within 5 miles of a Wal-mart. Wal-mart isn't the killer of local hardware stores. If they died, its more likely to be the result of Lowe's, Home Depot, and other big box lumber/hardware stores. The ones I'm familiar with that survived stock difficult to find items and specialize in the needs of their neighborhoods/areas. Most of those that failed failed not because of Wal-mart or the big box hardware/lumber retailers, but for many other reasons, mostly self-inflicted.
So what you're saying here is that every local store has to specialize in some niche to survive, but that the big box stores had nothing to do with it? You also imply that the only people capable of properly running a business that isn't niche are Walmart, HD, Lowes, etc.
FWIW - they did it by convincing people they would get the same product and the same service for a lower price. And they did...for a few years. Now, almost NOTHING is made in America, it's all disposable crap, and finding someone in one of these stores who can actually give you good advice is almost impossible. Remember when all the Walmart stuff said, "buy American"? Remember when Home Depot's big selling point was that there was an expert on every eisle? Walmart kept "driving down prices" by buying more and more from sweatshops overseas and people will still drive an hour round trip in a gas guzzler with their "Country First" bumper sticker, in order to save a dollar, but they're not helping their country, they're helping China and Iraq.