What WOW is not good at, page-27

Where I live I used to have a Bunnings next door to a BigW. Prior to the arrival of Masters the BigW used to stock decent quality power tools and a good range of hardware. Generally if I was just nipping down the street to pick up some small hardware consumable it was often easier and cheaper at BigW. BigW carried the Bosch range of tools and were well priced against equivalent quality tools at Bunnings.

Then Bunnings started to dumb down their stock. They got rid of name brands and bought in Ozito and lots of other lines of the cheapest hardware and equipment they could find. This all appealed to the Australian buyer's mentality of the cheapest option is best. Never mind the quality feel the width. BigW was starting to look better for garden things, auto and tools.

Then WOW thought up the Masters Plan. So let's dumb down the BigW stock. Let's get rid of most of the hardware lines so we don't compete with Masters. Lets get rid of most of the car stuff cause Kmart is also dumping their lines or maybe Super Cheap was taking that ground. Then get rid of most of the garden centre and dumb down the garden centre tool line to generics. Then let Lowes define the Masters entry based on USA experience.

I don't think the overall Masters product line is much smaller than Bunnings, but it doesn't somehow seem to have the variety. Bunnings puts in three or four brands of the lines it sell, whereas Masters seems to carry at most two, a house brand generic and a Brand name. I can find what I want at Masters but I can probably find a 5c cheaper generic one at Bunnings. Just for fun compare the light globe range at Bunnings and Masters.

The Bunnings near me recently moved into a new Building about 1km away. This building has got to be one of the worst configurations for a high volume, bulk materials business site I've come across. The site access is actually quite appalling given that it was virgin land to start with and they must have given the design brief to a work experience student to play with. I thought trading at the relatively close Masters would take off after it opened, but no - the crowds still swarm to Bunnings content to play dodgem cars in the carpark and wait interminably long to get in and out of the site.

What Bunnings have is a brighter store, I'm pretty sure the colour scheme is a big put off at Masters. It feels more depressing walking into their stores that are blue inside and out. I suppose that's what you get for picking up a brand livery derived from a North American snowy climate.

I get the feeling Masters is only a tweak or two away from taking off. Good luck to the management that figures out the tweak required.