I hear what you're saying.
I think that sometimes people theorize as follows. The specialty merchants still sell garden-variety tools for bread-and-butter money. The expert wholesalers like Amazon, Wal-Mart, etc., only sell some of the bread-and-butter stuff. So, there is a risk to a set of suppliers when the wholesalers start dealing in the bread-and-butter items. This in turn could make it harder to procure specialty products.
I know a work crew that does good work, and have chatted with them about shopping at 'Home Depot' type places vs. local specialty hardware stores. They prefer the latter, but for some reason often end up at the former.
Anyway, I was just wondering about people's opinions. I think I would prefer to patronize specialty sources, because they'll know what they're talking about, and can even pre-service tools (sending them sharpened already, for example).
