Hi, just thought i'ld think aloud on this one. considering...

Hi, just thought i'ld think aloud on this one. considering buying into WOW and just thought i'ld do some research on their latest venture opening Hardware shops. I dont live in Aust but am from there(Melbourne) and from my experience as a renovator of property have found the existing Bunnings warehouses fantastic (price wise and range of products, service and location) so:
1. I really wonder how much better the Masters/Lowes experience could actually be? Anyone with contrary experience/

2. Is there sufficient demand in Aust for more warehouse style hardware shops or will it just be another price war with Wesfarmer's highly Bunnings? Coke versus Virgin Cola springs mind. To this end i dug up some data on what i consider a similar market, US.
US's top 2 hardware stores Home Depot and Lowes have around 2002 and 1730 stores respectively, a total of 3752 stores.
The total no of households in US is 112.6 Million. So that is 30174Households/ Store.
Applying this to Aust then: we have 7.4Million households.
This translates to 7.4M/30174 = 245 stores.
Bunnings already has 280 stores in Aust!!

Some notes: a)Bunnings has 167 large warehouses. I havent discovered how many of the uS Home Depots and Lowes are large warehouse types so with the calcs above i believe i'm comparing apples with apples.
b) also it seems Aust households are increasing at a rate of 2.4%/ year so that creates increasing demand.
c) Not sure the cost of one store but it looks like $20Mill/store.
It's too late in the evening to do more investigation especially with expected earnings, etc but did wanna get this out there to hear what others think about Woolworth's next initiative.
with best regards,
ArrpegioC