Main Street Hardware vs the Big Box
Run the independent hardware store on Main Street in a town of 15,000 the year a big-box home center opens off the highway. Keep the contractors, the farms and the Saturday fixer-uppers, or watch them drive past.
You have reopened the old hardware store on Main Street: a narrow shop with a key machine, a paint shaker and eighty years of goodwill. The town has 15,000 people, the county another 25,000, and this spring a 100,000-square-foot home center opened at the highway exit with a lumber yard, a garden center and prices you cannot match on a single sheet of drywall. The decisions are the ones every independent faces: whether to match the big box on price or charge for advice and service, how much stock to carry when the bank wants it turned, whether to win the contractors with accounts and a 6:30 opening, and whether to open a counter out in the county where the farms are. It teaches how a small retailer survives a cheaper rival: margin against volume, service as a product, and choosing which customers to lose.
$5.00 a seat · 3 simulated years, decided monthly · by SparkTower.