Rockler vs Woodcraft

as much as I don't like taylor swift, peter (sorry - she's a wealth transfer system for middle class girls to one upper class girl), the video .....well, first, I spent all I could spend at WC and Rockler early on until the stuff remaining that I hadn't bought didn't make any sense money wise - as in far less expensive to get elsewhere. 

But the YT videos like that are a plague. "One or the other" is a false dilemma and the point of the video really isn't anything to do with what's better, it's "how do I get suckers to click on token links so I can get revenue without actually providing any value to anyone". 

I pick Rufus if there's a fourth option - just because they're telling me something good at the moment in my audio background.

I like Woodcraft's selection better, but we have a local Rockler in San Diego, so I like to support them.  Even though they are a corporate store, they are still brick and mortar in my community.

My rockler was literally 2 miles up the main through way my development was off of, but that did lead to going in too many times and running out of stuff to buy quickly. 

At the time, they carried general finishes but so did the home depot up the hill. That may not be true any longer, but back then, to get a general finishes product the same price as HD had it, you had to wait for a 25% coupon and sometimes that still didn't close the gap. 

when I built my kitchen, for blum stuff, they were double a cabinet supplier, and the lumber was something you could get from time to time there if they brought in pallets and sold one off stuff. As in, there as a rack of wood with all of the typical stuff, but it was full price. They'd have some wood that was a step down in quality but sometimes it was legitimately cheap and worth getting. 

.... and then..

.....they moved to the other side of the city and a pot dispensary took over the store that was here. I suspect that the pot dispensary unseated rockler based on the property owner's ability to get more rent from them, that's probably more accurate. 

Woodcraft has taken their lumps here and is too far for me to drive in the middle of the day (traffic), closing one store abruptly and then a few years later, another one opened. 

It's got to cost the moon to get a reasonably large retail space along a main corridor. A restaurant owner on the same stretch leases half the space that rockler had for about $15k a month. 

never knew who the owner was at the local rockler - but given that we always knew who the manager was at any given time, probably a corporate store.