Books on the building of hardware big box stores

[beerbaron]

I'm looking for some good books on how Home-Depot, Lowes, Target, etc... were able to win in their respective markets. Anybody has good books to recommend?

 

BeerBaron

[jay21]

Greenwald's book, Competition Demystified, talked a little about HD and Lowes, iirc.  Great book worth a pick up. 

 

I'd also recommend Sam Waltons book if you want to learn about retail.

[PlanMaestro]

The problem is that most books on retailers go the narrative / biographic route. The best of those is of course San Walton's "Made in America". I really like "Power Retail" if you want something more quantitative with an emphasis in big boxes.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Power-Retail-Strategies-Chapters-Retailers/dp/0075609967

[PlanMaestro]

Another good one is the "Big Store". Donald Katz interviewed Sears executives during their failed early 80s turnaround. Good background especially when the author completely ate management stories of future success finishing the book before the failure was evident. You get to meet people like Philip Purcell, future CEO of Morgan Stanley, in his early management consultant days. Also gives a perspective of how the old business model reacted to the category killer boom (moving into financial services among other things).

 

http://www.amazon.com/Big-Store-Donald-R-Katz/dp/0670805122/ref=la_B001HMN5KM_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1354482650&sr=1-1

 

And now that we are into Sears turnarounds that didn't succeed, Arthur Martinez wrote a book of his early 90s turnaround also calling success too early ("The softer side of Sears").

 

http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Road-Softer-Side-Transformation/dp/0812929608/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_2