[masraum]

We live very rural. We are fortunate to have 4 small/farm town hardware stores <12 miles, and one that's like a cross between a farm store and big box store about 20 miles away. But none of them carry as much stuff as a HD or Lowes. Fortunately, sometimes HD and/or Lowes has what I need with free shipping. If that's the case, then I may order it. If that's not the case, then we make the 50 mile hike. It's actually a new store that shaved about 7 miles off of the previous hike that we used to have to make.

If we want to go to Target, we're making a 50 mile hike. We have a small town Walmart ~10 miles away. I've probably been <5, definitely <10 times in the last 3.5 years.

We do order a lot of stuff from Amazon. Almost the entire time, they've been shipping via USPS and it's been great. They recently switched to UPS and it's added 1-2 days, but other than that, still reliable.

We buy local when we can, but there's a lot that we can't buy local (or if we did, it would be 3-5x the price which may not be a big deal when the item is <$20, but starts to add up when the cost goes up.