AutoZone

There are an estimated 285 million registered ve On average, these ve Over the past, well, century, I would say, smaller local retailers have slowly been replaced by national chains. Napa and advanced auto parts are examples of companies that have opened stores across the United States and even in other countries, however, I t By most measures, they are the biggest, most well-known, and most successful. On top of that, you have to admit that these have two of the catc I mean, I cannot even drive past an O'Reilly's without hearing that song in my head. And the same goes for AutoZone. Trust me, you are going to be singing those for the rest of the day now. The two jingles were created wit So for t I t O'Reilly, I would say, was much more traditional, with O'Reilly being the name of the family that started it. In 1957, Charles O'Reilly and Their experience and connections wit Over the next 25 years, the company saw slow but steady growth, opening dozens of stores throughout Missouri. By the 1980s, Chubb had four c In 1995, Chubb O'Reilly was replaced by David O'Reilly as president, but remained on the board of directors, w In 2005, Chubb passed away at 92 years old, coincidentally only three months after David retired as president and was replaced by two people from outside the family for the first time ever. It is easy to get lost in the details here, but the owners Now AutoZone was actually started 22 years after O'Reilly in 1979 by Pitt Hyde as part of It started out as one of many attempts to expand that business into specialty retail. Before the Auto Parts Store, he had also opened a drug store and a sporting goods store, but obviously the Auto Parts Store he opened in Forest City, Arkansas quickly proved to be the most promising. I also want to mention here that AutoZone was originally called AutoShack until the name was changed following a lawsuit by RadioShack in the 1980s. Then later on in the 1990s, RadioShack was unsuccessfully sued by AutoZone because they had a section of their store with chargers and batteries and stuff that they called PowerZone. So there was kind of an unexpected rivalry going on between those two. In 1997, he stepped down from So even though neither one is really a family company today, they were when they started out and first established their identity and position wit And that is going to lead me right into the next category of comparison that I'm going to call emphasis. O'Reilly was started by two people who knew a lot about Auto Parts, whereas AutoZone was started by someone who knew very little about Auto Parts, but a lot about retail. And to t From the beginning, O'Reilly has emphasized knowledgeable employees and a wide selection of products, currently over 150,000 stock keeping units, many of w By the way, I recommend reading AutoZone's annual report from the year 2000 because they actually use the phrase good for them when referring to competitors O'Reilly has a reputation for promoting from wit They say that the vast majority of their senior district and store managers have been promoted from wit Now, AutoZone, as you might expect, given the founders' retail background, has focused much more on the store itself. We have to remember here that back when they started out, Auto Parts stores were known to be a little scattered and dirty. I mean, some of their biggest competition was literally coming from junk yards. And these different approaches to standing out by each company have been a factor in attracting different customers. O'Reilly has tried to maintain an equal balance of customers that are working on their own cars and people who are working on other people's cars professionally. Whereas AutoZone has leaned much further toward customers who work on their own cars. However, starting in the 1990s, they have been doing more and more to attract professional customers, They believe they can eventually grow to 10,000 locations in the United States, almost 3,500 more than they currently have because there is so much more room to grow wit I don't know about you, but to me, it already feels Overall, I would say that these two stores are more similar today than they have ever been before. So for anybody who has been a customer at either store, please share what you believe to be the biggest differences between them and how that has changed over the years. My next comparison is going to be the size of the two companies, but before anyt These are Fortune 500 companies that are recognizable to almost anybody in the United States, whether or not you own a car. Impressively, neither company has ever reported a loss, with net income increasing almost every year for as long as it has been reported. It is a resilient business, because consider, even when the economy is slow and people do not have much money to spend, well that just means that they are more AutoZone had its initial public offering in 1991, followed by O'Reilly's initial offering in 1993, meaning the two companies joined the stock market within two years of each other and almost anybody who was invested in either one of them at any point has Seriously, these have been two of the best performing stocks on the market over that time. AutoZone has gone up 58,000%, reac They have increased 65,000% to an almost $90 billion valuation. Even though O'Reilly had a 22-year head start, they were still just a regional chain in Missouri when AutoZone, or I guess AutoShack at the time, opened its first store. And because part of AutoZone slash AutoShack's business plan was to offer lower prices made possible through economies of scale, they were really aggressive in opening new stores, reac In fact, they opened their 500 store the same year O'Reilly opened their 100 store. But then, in the following decades, O'Reilly became the more aggressive of the two, to a point where they have almost caught up to AutoZone in terms of sales and n To go along with t Personally, I would not really consider either one of them to be a global brand, but AutoZone is undeniably closer to it. They opened their first international location in Mexico in 1998, and have since opened almost 800 more of them. W And then aside from Mexico, O'Reilly expanded into Canada, logically at the end of 2023, before AutoZone, but AutoZone has been operating in Brazil since 2012. Again, overall international operations are still a comparatively insignificant part of these companies, but AutoZone has established more of a foundation outside of the United States. Finally, going back to the list, I want to take a look at their methods of growth over the years, pointing out that O'Reilly has been much more reliant on acquiring competitors compared to AutoZone. Remember, both businesses started out in a similar part of the country, just a few hundred miles away from each other, and when the time came to expand into new areas of the country, O'Reilly was much more They would buy a bunch of stores in the area, and then rebrand them under the O'Reilly name. A couple of the more notable ones would be in 1998. They almost doubled in size when they acquired a Then, 10 years later, they almost doubled in size again when they spent around $1 billion to acquire over 1,300 stores under various names across 12 different states. As far as I can tell, the most comparable acquisition made by AutoZone was in 1998, the same year as that first one from O'Reilly, when they bought c They obtained 560 stores that were mostly in California, quickly giving them a strong presence in a new part of the country. To be clear, they have both made multiple acquisitions on the way to becoming as big as they are, but O'Reilly has been more reliant on it while AutoZone has been more My guess is that a lot of the people watc Let me know in the comments, what do you t Are they becoming more When you need an auto part, or maybe one of the other services, As a side note, I also wanted to include a little bit more about those other chains So, any other thoughts you have about O'Reilly, or AutoZone, or any of the others, leave them in the comments. I'd