The big four

A universe that once consisted of more than 500 full-line wholesalers now comprises less than 100 firms, with four of them dominating in size with sales of more than one billion dollars. And most of the smaller remaining firms belong to one of two groups of wholesalers, banded together to consolidate buying power and to develop marketing services for the wholesalers. They are Distribution America and Pro Hardware.
Three of the four largest firms are dealer-owned co-operatives - Ace Hardware, Do it Best and True Value. The fourth, Orgill, is privately owned.
Today's wholesalers, whether large or small, are truly marketing partners with their retail customers by helping them in many ways, i.e. providing various kinds of advertising help, encouraging them to modernise and improve their retail stores, and in most cases, conducting buying markets once or twice a year.
Supplying advertising help has been a wholesaler-provided service for decades, but has been changing during the past few years. For decades, wholesaler-provided advertising consisted mainly of printed circulars and catalogues for dealer distribution, mainly for key retailing seasons (spring, summer, autumn and Christmas).
But with the growth of the Internet, wholesalers have begun offering web-based marketing help of various kinds to their customers. They have also been using their own websites in various ways to generate online sales, many of which can be picked up at a local retailer's store.
Various kinds of ship-to-store systems are enabling independent retailers, whether hardware stores, home centres or lumber/building materials dealers, to tap into the world's fascination with online buying, bringing people into their stores where they are exposed to more products and have an opportunity to appraise a local retailer's service and product assortment.
Increasingly, however, the four wholesaling giants continue to grow market share.Ace Hardware is the largest with wholesale sales of USD 5.3 bn and now supplies about 4 400 stores in the U.S., plus 600 in 63 other countries. As of November 2017, sales were up 5 per cent and third-quarter same-store results from reporting stores were 7.1 per cent.

All four of the giants are active internationally, not…