Is Restoration Hardware a local business - anymore?

Yes, it once was. But is it now? ☛TS Local vigilance needed to preserve business ☛TS Eureka Restoration Hardware to shut its doors
As the TS notes Restoration Hardware was established in 1980, when Eureka resident and founder Stephen Gordon was restoring his Queen Anne Victorian house. Days spent tracking down missing bits and pieces of authentic period hardware, lighting fixtures and finishes led Gordon to realize there was a market for such items.

But someone in the comments points out that Restoration hardware is far from local these days...In 2007, Restoration Hardware Inc., the Corte Madera home-furnishings chain, agreed to sell itself to a private-equity firm for $267 million.

Restoration Hardware had been struggling in the aftermath of the housing slump. In 2006, it earned $3 million on revenue of $713 million; in 2005 it lost $29 million on $582 million in revenue. After this move, Sears got in on the sale and attempted to buy Restoration but that fell thru to and the company was sold to private equity firms Catterton Partners and Tower Three Partners LLC who now have a controlling interest in the company. Gary Friedman, chairman and CEO, also has an equity interest from this sale. Friedman was the former president of Williams-Sonoma.

The stock price for Restoration Hardware has slid continuously since 2006, when it was trading above $9 per share. In 2007 it hovered below $3 per share. Then in June of 2008, Restoration Hardware, Inc. announced that the acquisition of the Company by a group of investors including Catterton Partners and Gary Friedman, the Company's Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, had been completed. The terms of the merger agreement, which was approved by shareholders in June of 2008, all of the outstanding shares of common stock of Restoration Hardware, other than those exchanged by certain shareholders participating with Catterton Partners in the transaction, received $4.50 per share in cash. After the purchase, the new owners announced that they would be closing 2 of its 100 stores in the United States and would open up a new store in Canada.

Guess of all the stores to close, the little one where it all started landed on the chopping block because it wasn't profitable to keep in open to cater to such a small group of folks in Humboldt.

Others say the Eureka store was profitable. Is it just that we are too far off the beaten track?

And how do you go about protecting local business? There's a faction that believes they have to keep out "Big Boxes' in order to do so, but, once again, the Big Box did not close this store, and it could be argued that Resto IS now in Big Box territory as a big chain itself.

There's been an ongoing discussion