Wesfarmers’ cash cow Bunnings remains the head honcho of hardware, with nearly half of adult Australians, or over nine million Australians aged 14 years and over, shopping at the store within an average four week period in the year to June 2014, according to market research organisation Roy Morgan Research.

The real battle is for second place, between Woolworths-owned Masters Hardware and Metcash’s ‘Mighty Helpful’ Mitre 10, the latest data from Roy Morgan Research shows.

Masters Hardware is, as their ads claim, ‘Australia’s fastest growing hardware store’, with the number of shoppers tripling over the last two years from 400,000 in an average four weeks to over 1.2m. The number of people shopping at Mitre 10, however, has fallen by an average of over 100,000 annually since 2010.

Home Hardware has maintained around half a million shoppers nationwide a month over the last three years.

“Masters is making solid gains in customer satisfaction, which feeds back into increased customer numbers,” said Warren Reid, Group Account Director, Roy Morgan Research. “In the year to June 2012, just 67 per cent of its recent customers said they were very or fairly satisfied, A year later, it was up to 75 per cent of customers, and rose again to 82 per cent in the year to June 2014.

“However on overall satisfaction, Masters still trails Bunnings, Mitre 10 and Home Hardware by around 4-6 per cent points,” Mr Reid said.

Mr Reid said that customers of the ‘Big Box’ retailers Bunnings and Masters shared a number of demographic characteristics, including a more neutral gender split compared with other hardware stores.

“But further analysis using our Helix Personas segmentation tool shows that people in ‘middle Australian’ communities are well over-represented among Masters’ customers,” Mr Reid said.

Mr Reid said that around 1 in 8 Roy Morgan Research’s Today’s Families demographic and 1 in 11 in the Aussie Achievers demographic visited Masters in an average month, compared with around 1 in 16 Australians overall.

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