You've brought up a important topic, buying from a retailer whose employees can give you accurate information on a project.
For these types of projects we buy at a local Ace Hardware called Koontz whose employees are incredibly knowledgeable with long tenure. many homes in the Koontz area were built in the 1920s and Koontz stocks everything odd thing homes in their market area need.
Koontz is more costly, but If we go to Home Depot or Lowes I get to talk to someone who pretends to know what they're talking about, but really only knows what aisle everything is stocked on. Compared to Koontz Hardware, Home Depot and Lowes are essentially brick and mortar online vendors. I can buy two stainless steel machine screws and nuts at Koontz, but at Home Depot, Lowes, and Amazon I have to buy an entire package.
How do I make a decision between Koontz and Amazon? Koontz is a very good retailer and makes that decision incredibly easy for me. Their prices are similar to Amazon except for items you might need right now which are sensibly priced more costly but cheaper or the same when paying for expedited same-day delivery from Amazon.
But Koontz is exceptional and other Ace hardware stores in Los Angeles are more like Home Depot. But some have a specialty. Tashman's Ace Hardware is a great place to purchase custom made window screens, but pretty Home Depotish with other items. Due to their cost on quality Tashman's have a monopoly on screens.
This is how I see retail evolving. You have to be good and reasonably priced in something. With Tashman's it's screens, with Koontz it's home repair items for West Hollywood homes, and with Lowes and Home Depot it's mostly heavy commodity items.
A weakness I've seen in Home Depot and Lowes is their online inventory at the local stores in no way matches the actual inventory at the physical store. So both are doing a terrible job at tracking what they have and what they've sold or lost to theft. That's not a problem at Amazon.
Koontz whose employees know how much of everything they have including the stock upstairs and they're the ones who reorder and decide what to carry. I could be wrong but I'm pretty confident Koontz's theft losses are very low as smaller things are placed in bags by the department employee and marked with the price before you go to the register.
We've run out of other people's Social Security taxes needed to subsidize our low income tax rates.
