[apechai]

This is more likely to put mom & pop stores out of business than threaten the big players like Fastenal, Grainger, McMaster-Carr and MSC Direct.

Mom & pops focus more on retail / small business customers who are price sensitive, so this is going to hurt them.

But the big players mainly rely on their services because industrial and commercial customers care more about minimizing downtime and reliability than on price. The customer service at these companies is great and helps sort through 1 million+ skews, which is completely different from picking 1 out of 20 TVs at Best Buy.

Their customers are companies like Caterpillar who need projects to be on time and same day delivery. Fastenal even puts fasteners directly inside of bins on the assembly lines so that the customer doesn't have to haul a huge chunks of metal.

Amazon would have to seriously boost its service (ie, same day to location) delivery to gain the non-retail customer base as well as expand its sales staff expertise dramatically (which of the 1000 cutting tool bits do I need for X job, what angle does it have to be installed at etc?). What this will do is consolidate the industry with Amazon and the existing big players at the expense of the mom & pops which are over 80% of the market.

It's a $140-160bn a year market. Just goes to show how much opportunity there is in technology to expand outside of consumer-focused businesses.