Profile

•  Tractor Supply Company (TSC) was started in 1938 and its head office is in Brentwood, TN. It is a public company with over 32,000 employees and its annual revenue exceeds $8 billion.
• The company is reported to be the top rural lifestyle retailer in the US and to be a one-stop-shop for people who enjoy living the rural lifestyle, including recreational farmers and ranchers.
•  Tractor Supply Company offerings include a wide range of products designed to care for home, land, pets, and animals. It indicates that its focus is on product localization, exclusive brands, and customer satisfaction.
• The company's strategy is to provide a convenient shopping experience where customers can get services anywhere, at any time, and in any way.

Stores

• Tractor Supply Company's 2019 annual report indicated that the company had about 2,024 stores located in about 49 states in the US, including about 1,844 tractor supply stores and about 180 pet specialty stores, and e-commerce websites.
• The general information about the locations of the company's stores is as shown in the image below:
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• Information on the distribution of the stores in the US can be found here and guidelines on how to locate the company's stores can be found here. 

Competitors

• According to Craft.co, TSC's key competitors are Lowes, The Home Depot, The Travel Centers of America, Sherwin-Williams, and Lumber Liquidators. 
•  Lowe's offerings include products for construction, maintenance, repair, remodeling, and decorating.

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•  Comparably lists The Home Depot, Ace Hardware, Harbor Freight Tools, Lowe's and Lumber Liquidators as TSC's top competitors.

TSC's Popularity

• According to CNN Business, TSC offers an ideal case study on how a company can win customer loyalty and CNN highlights reasons why TSC is a preferred destination for rural America's recreational farmers, ranchers, and tradesmen. The company is reported to have a strong focus on customer satisfaction. 
• In order to serve its customers well, TSC employs people who have farming and ranching backgrounds and the employees offer training to customers on subjects like how to care for animals and how to do repairs on the farm.
•  TSC offers online expert advice to its customers using tip sheets and videos on subjects like how to manage horses, how to keep chicken, and how to fence goats.
• The company's stores offer almost everything needed to maintain their ranches, homes, farms, barns, and take care of their pets. These offerings save customers the pain of making separate visits to auto shops, hardware shops, and gardening stores.
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•  Tractor Supply Company enhanced its e-commerce option to attract its online customers and it added over 100,000 items to its website and buy-online-pickup-in-store options. The company reports that about 75% of its online orders are picked up in stores.
• The company recently launched a loyalty program, the Neighbor's Club, which already has about 10 million members, and this program will enable the company to gather data on its customers.

TSC's Uniqueness

• According to Forbes,  TSC is unique because it is very specific on the customer segments and purchases it owns and the company makes every effort to remain relevant to its customers.
•  Forbes observed that TSC had a well-designed customer journey and it has good knowledge of each touchpoint in the customer journey. This makes the company deliver an exemplary customer experience. Forbes further reports that TSC is highly innovative and agile.
•  TSC's former chair, Joe Scarlett, says the company established good working relations with its suppliers and ensured that it got goods to the market before its competitors.
•  Joe Scarlet indicated that TSC's management established a strong company culture founded on 'a very strong mission and very strong values'. He noted that TSC's employees deal positively with customers because they love their company.
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• The former chair says that the company created the Tractor Supply University responsible for ensuring that the right people are hired, taught, trained, coached, and developed.
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Awards & Revenue

• According to Businesswire, TSC's net sales for the January-June 2020 period increased by about 23% compared to the same period last year. Businesswire reports that the company's net sales for the first half of 2020 were about $5.1 billion compared to about 4.2 billion in 2019.  
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• Fortune indicates that in 2014, TSC was ranked at position 480 and the company rose to position 388 in 2019.

Tractor Supply Company's Target Market

•  The Rational Walk indicates that TSC's target market is recreational farmers and ranchers who live a rural lifestyle.
• A sizable population of Americans prefers to live in rural areas to avoid the congestion and dangers associated with urban life.
• According to MarketWatch, TSC's customers live a pastoral and they love the land and enjoy rural community life and animals.
•  Chegg Study provides the list of names by which TSC's customers are called, including ex-urbanites, hobby farmers, sundowner farmers, and ruralpolitans.

Recreational Farmers and Ranchers

• The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) provides some demographic information on farmers in the US including recreational farmers.
• The information provided by USDA reveals that the average annual farm income is about $43,000, about 96% of the farms are family-owned, the average farm size is about 441 acres, about 75% of farms have internet access, the average age of the farmers is about 57 years, and about 36% of the farmers are female.
• According to Google, about 95% of farmers, including recreational farmers are white and blacks account for just about 1.4% of farmers in the US. 
• Google indicates that about 95% of recreation farmers have at least a high school education and that 44% of these farmers have at least a college degree.
• According to Data USA, farmers and ranchers are mostly employed by the farming industry and their mean annual wage was about $54,000 in 2016.
•  Data USA reported that the occupations that offer wages similar to the wages earned by farmers and ranchers include telecommunications line installers & repairers, structural iron & steelworkers, and media and communication workers.
•  TSC's 2018 annual report shows that the company's sales amounted to about $7.9 billion and the company had about 10 million customers. This means that the average amount of money each TSC customer spends on the company annually is about $790 calculated by the formula: total sales/number of customers=$7,900,000,000/10,000,000=$790/customer. 
• Since TSC's customers are mostly recreational farmers and ranchers, we assumed that the demographics provided for recreational farmers and ranchers apply to TSC's customers.

TSC's Customers

• According to Tractor Supply Company (TSC), its customers are people who enjoy living the rural lifestyle, including recreational farmers and ranchers.
•  Google describes TSC's customers as hobby farmers, ranchers, horse owners, ranchers, suburban and rural homeowners, contractors, and tradesmen.
• Fortune reports that there is an increasing number of TSC's recreational farmers and ranchers using the company's e-commerce component:
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America's Rural Lifestyle

•  Americans in rural areas have a strong sense of commitment to their local communities and they value life, family, and jobs in rural America. They value good relationships with their neighbors, residing in small towns, and living among good people.
• They are however disturbed by the various problems facing their communities, including financial problems, health challenges, and drug abuse.
• Rural Americans yearn to see several changes in their communities, including increased availability of long-term jobs, improved quality of local schools, better access to health care, and opportunities for advanced job training.
• According to the Stanford Social Innovation Review, rural Americans enjoy working on projects that boost community cohesion, such as community health and wellness projects.
•  Rural Americans love to spend their time on things that enhance community conversations, partnerships, mutual understandings, and trust.
•  Americans in rural areas love to hold multiple civic roles. Stanford Social Innovation Review cites a case of a man in Louisiana who was a church pastor, a school bus driver, and he headed a daycare facility.
• According to MediaPost, rural Americans value their independence, and they celebrate buying things made through local community efforts.
•  Rural Americans prefer local brands over large corporations and companies that wish to take technology to rural America should first seek to identify with the existing local solutions. MediaPost suggests that working with local heroes and icons (Influencers) in the rural community will enhance product acceptance.
• Digital Commerce 360 indicates that mobile phone transactions account for about 70% of TSC's online traffic and over 50% of its e-commerce transactions.
• Since Tractor Supply Company's customer are mostly from rural communities, we assumed that the psychographics for rural America reflects the psychographics for TSC's customers.