I'm spoiled by having a local Microcenter here in Houston. Not always the cheapest filament, but it's often competitive enough. Inland is as good as any other brand I've tried, and in some cases, I prefer their colors.

Xyltech is also in Houston, and they don't have a typical retail operation, but you can place an order and pick it up.

Polymaker has a Houston warehouse, and while you can't pick it up, a number of SKUs actually ship from there.

Often I buy bulk purchases of Sunlu from Aliexpress. Usually takes about 8 days to get to me, but at around $11/KG for PLA+, it's a great price.

It turns local businesses into showrooms for Amazon, and that is a failing business model.

I do not patronize Amazon. But f I did, I would pick a margin - let's say 20% - and resolve to buy locally when the price is at least that close to the online price.

> But f I did, I would pick a margin - let's say 20% - and resolve to buy locally when the price is at least that close to the online price.

Focusing on the price is a complete misunderstanding. Just looking at my recent amazon purchases. I have bought 3mm and 2mm thick brass sheets, 0.8mm endmills, a set of dwarven miner minis, and a highlander cow shaped slipper. I have no clue which shop would even hope to have these things. I could get on my bike and go to all the hardware shops around me in the hopes that maybe they have endmills, or all the department stores and walk up and down to see if they have the slippers I'm thinking about. And I would be still without brass sheets and dwarven miners.

Or I can from the comfort of wherever I am browse a wild selection of things and get them for reasonable price. I bought the miner minis while physically situated in a coffee shop waiting for my friend to return from the washroom. Just because I happened to have a minute to think about what I need for our next DnD session. That is insanely convenient.

You do have a pretty niche use case tho. Aany issues with inferior product quality ?

That's equivalent to you making 20% less money.

Not many people will choose that.

Behold! Neighborhood businesses wither and die.

When all the business does is order from the catalog shipped from China and stock a shelf it’s not that worrisome when they die.

Businesses that should be able to sustain themselves are things that have additional experiences and services. Food, coffee, sports shops with fittings or lessons, bike shops with repair rooms, art galleries that are fun to browse, clothing stores that you can touch and try on, stuff crafted locally that is tangibly better than something mass produced, etc.

Multibrand retail should be about curation, and a shop that does little more than open boxes is not worth supporting, I'll grant you that.

Your list is good, but how many are vulnerable to competition from online ?

> The overheads of physical retail stores makes it all but impossible for them to compete with online shopping.

As a purely-theoretical thought experiment, this may be true.

As a blanket statement about prices in the real world, this is not correct.

There are many stores around me here in San Francisco who absolutely do have prices that are close to (and sometimes lower than) "e-tailer" prices. If stores in SF can meet or beat "e-tailer" prices, I find it hard to believe that stores in Bum-fuck Nowhere, USA can't ever do the same.

I think it's a mistake to look at the % price difference instead of the dollar price difference. It's a $33 dollar difference. Which is not much if you are a busy person, but a lot if you have time to shop around. If you're buying a motorcycle and it's $6200 at your local dealer and $6100 a couple of towns away, then you'd consider that difference negligible.

Every local business should be a "local online business" as you suggest. But most business owners don't give a fuck and are happy to see Amazon crush them. Why?

I used to try to support local business, but frankly it's such a waste of time to go looking for products that they never have in stock, ward off annoying salesmen who never have a clue if you actually need help, and dealing with bad return policies. The price difference is but icing on the cake.

You should check out Protopasta! Their prices aren't rock bottom ($30 for a 1kg spool of PLA) but the product is really good and if you happen to live near the warehouse you can pick up your order on the same day

For filament I typically order directly from the manufacturer (dasfilament for example) but idk if that's viable in the US