There is a category of business you never think about until the exact moment you desperately need it. The plumber. The locksmith. The tow truck. Batteries Plus lives in that category - and it has quietly built 730 stores out of the panic that hits when your car won't turn over, the smoke alarm chirps at 3 a.m., or your phone screen becomes a spiderweb of glass on the kitchen floor.
Founded in a Green Bay, Wisconsin storefront in 1988 by Ron Rezetko, the chain now stretches across 48 states and Puerto Rico. It is not trying to be exciting. Its tagline - "Power it. Light it. Fix it." - reads like an instruction manual. And that plainness is the entire point. Batteries Plus sells the products nobody browses for pleasure and everybody eventually has to buy: batteries of nearly every shape and chemistry, light bulbs by the thousands, and, increasingly, the labor to fix the devices those batteries live inside.
01 / The IdeaThe business of the boring
Most retailers want you to visit often and linger. Batteries Plus works on the opposite premise. You come in rarely, you come in stressed, and you leave fast - ideally with the one obscure thing that makes your life work again. A typical store, between 1,200 and 1,800 square feet, stocks more than 25,000 different battery types and roughly 15,000 lighting solutions. That is more variations of a single product family than most stores carry in their entire inventory.
The genius of the model is depth. Anyone can sell you a four-pack of AAs. Far fewer can produce, on demand, the specific coin cell for a car key, the AGM battery for a bass boat, the sealed pack inside a cordless drill, or a replacement for a hearing aid. Batteries Plus made "we probably have the one you need" its reason to exist - and then wrapped a knowledgeable person around the shelf to help you find it.
A battery is the one product nobody wants but everybody eventually needs. Batteries Plus built a national chain on that exact moment of need.
02 / What It SellsPower, light, and repair
The company sorts itself into three jobs. Power covers batteries for cars, trucks, boats, powersports, medical devices, laptops, phones and industrial equipment, sold under names like Duracell and Rayovac alongside its own premium house brand, X2Power. Light covers LED, CFL, halogen and specialty bulbs for homes and commercial buildings - the category it leaned into so hard that from 2013 to 2021 the company was literally named "Batteries Plus Bulbs." Fix is the newest and, in many ways, the most interesting.
In 2014 the chain launched nationwide smartphone and tablet repair. It later added key cutting and key fob programming - a genuinely clever move, since dealerships charge eye-watering prices to replace a car fob, and here was a neighborhood store that could cut and program one while you waited. These services matter out of proportion to their shelf space: they carry high margins, they pull in foot traffic, and they turn a commodity retailer into something closer to a service counter.
03 / The CustomersTwo counters, one store
Walk into any location and you are looking at two businesses sharing a floor. The front is B2C: the parent replacing a smoke-detector battery, the teenager with a cracked phone, the boater prepping for the season, the retiree whose key fob just died in a parking lot. The back is B2B - the part most shoppers never see. Contractors, fleet operators, healthcare facilities, schools and municipal governments buy batteries and bulbs in volume through commercial accounts, and that steady institutional demand smooths out the impulse-driven consumer side.
It is also a quietly counter-cyclical business. When money is tight, people repair phones instead of replacing them, and they buy a new car battery instead of a new car. Blackouts and storms send customers looking for backup power. The things that make other retailers nervous tend to send people through the door here.
04 / The MoatHow it stayed ahead of the tariffs
The most instructive thing Batteries Plus has done in the last decade has nothing to do with what it sells and everything to do with where it buys. In 2018, as the first round of trade-war tariffs landed, CEO Scott Williams began methodically pulling the company's sourcing out of China. It was slow, unglamorous work: finding factories in other countries, qualifying them, and shifting product lines one at a time.
Bars scaled to a 40% axis. The remaining 4% stayed because of minerals the company couldn't reliably source elsewhere.
By 2025, China-sourced goods had dropped from about 32% of inventory to 4%. Car batteries under the X2Power brand now come from Malaysia and Vietnam, and the split was deliberate - built so the company could shift volume between countries depending on which ones got hit by new tariffs.
Diversify with key partners so that I can press the brake or the accelerator on different countries. Scott Williams, CEO, Batteries Plus
When the next wave of tariffs arrived in 2025, competitors scrambled. Batteries Plus mostly didn't. The lesson travels well beyond batteries: the time to diversify a supply chain is years before you are forced to, and the goal is optionality - the ability to press the brake or the accelerator on any one country at will.
05 / The ModelA franchise that runs on expertise
Batteries Plus is, at its core, a franchise operation. The company - privately held and owned since 2016 by Los Angeles firm Freeman Spogli & Co., after a stretch under Roark Capital - operates and franchises its stores, earning from product sales, service revenue, franchise fees and royalties. Franchising began early, in 1992, when Dan and Susan Manwaring opened the first franchised location in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
The unit economics are respectable for a category this quiet. Across 494 franchised stores in 2024, average net revenue came to $935,755, with the top quartile averaging roughly $1.6 million. The company kept expanding: 57 new franchise agreements and 30 store openings in 2024, another 17 agreements and 8 openings in early 2025 - including a first location in Hawaii. Franchisee Corey Robinson was named the International Franchise Association's Franchisee of the Year in 2024.
What franchisees are really buying is a system built around expertise. The stores are staffed by people expected to diagnose a problem - which battery, which bulb, whether a phone is worth fixing - rather than just ring up a sale. In a world where you can order almost anything online, "someone who knows the answer, 15 minutes from your house" is a surprisingly durable advantage.
06 / The FieldWhere it fits
Batteries Plus sits in an unusually fragmented competitive landscape, which is part of why it works. For raw batteries and bulbs it competes with Amazon, Home Depot, Walmart and Costco - but none of them match its depth of specialty stock or its in-person diagnosis. For car batteries and fobs it bumps up against AutoZone, Advance Auto Parts and the dealerships it happily undercuts. For device repair it faces Asurion's uBreakiFix and a long tail of independent phone-repair shops. And its closest spiritual rival, Interstate Batteries, plays largely through distribution rather than a national branded storefront.
No single competitor does all four jobs - power, light, repair and keys - under one roof, in one neighborhood store, for both walk-in consumers and commercial accounts. That bundle is the whole strategy. Batteries Plus is betting, as it has for 37 years, that boring and available beats trendy and out of stock.
The company is not chasing a moonshot. It is compounding a boring, essential need across more and more zip codes, adding services where the margins are, and hardening the supply chain underneath it all. For a store you only remember when something dies, that is a remarkably alive business.