Just my opinion, but I feel the best way for “today’s” small homebrew shop to stay in business is to also run a brew pub similar to The Homebrewer shop in – San Diego, CA
Your ingredients would rarely go bad, if the yeast is about to expire brew with it, hops getting old brew with it, grain going stale brew with it.
That being said, someone in Northern Alabama, please steal this idea and open up a homebrew shop/pub 
+1
I spied some open bags of grain over at Bee Zr. I thought about helping myself…
Or southern Alabama. Montgomery suffers from a shortage of breweries.
The real advantage a LHBS has over the online stores is to position itself as a center of gravity for the local homebrew community.
I have been kicking around some ideas … that’s one of them. However, I have no money at the moment.
I can introduce you to the brewer he’d probably sell you some
I worked down in dothan at a nuke plant. Their beer selection was 211 steel reserve you could buy at the dollar store lol
Dothan has more breweries per capita than the Montgomery Metro Area now.
Holy shit!
By which, of course, i mean they both have one. But Dothan has like 2/5 the population (~145k vs ~373k).
Whereas Huntsville, a bit larger than Montgomery (444k), has something like a dozen.
I was gonna say we were staying between Dothan and Farley Nuclear generating facility in a very small town filled with extremely nice people, and boy was it hard finding a good drink anywhere.
Dude who rented us a trailer was awesome brought me some fishing poles to use and a charcoal grill and a smoker since we were staying for a month or so
I just found Md HB online. My last couple of equipment buys have been from there and I was surprised and pleased with pricing and the speed of the shipping. I got some Quick connects in about 24 hrs. The shipped notice came within an hour. No extra charge. They don’t carry everything I needed to get brewing again but I check there first for everything I buy online. They were price competitive and way faster than MidW or NB. And I enjoy reading the recent Washington Post newspaper in which everything comes well wrapped. I am going to request the Local Crime section next order!
My local shop is a bit dismal, and I get Maris Otter there but getting my brewery built up was all purchased online. Last time I bought some beer hose from there I discovered the hose had dog hair on it when I got home. A BIG German Shepard has the run of the store.
Little hair of the dog eh??
This was a long while ago