Do They Have A Competitive Advantage?

$FAST's ($38B) main competitors (publicly traded) are W.W. Grainger ($47B) and MSC Industrial ($5B). Their physical product offerings are not heavily differentiated from their competitors. Fastenal is much more transparent about its # of locations than MSC. Fastenal also has many more physical branch locations than MSC, by ~1000. (1250 vs. 250.). MSC Is a much smaller company. Fastenal has 60% digital sales. W.W. Grainger has 75%, and MSC has 63%. Fastenal's main advantage appears to be the number of locations that their products are accessible in and their stated intent to growth this part of their business. From reading sites like Comparably.com and Reddit, the employees are happy, and people like the Fastenal VMI systems. Anecdotally, I find forums of people saying they like the Fastenal Venting machines better, but it is not a total blowout of people discussing how Fastenal is better. As a retailer, they are similar to Grainger most in size and services offered, so that is their nearest competitive advantage.