Hank Weber may be the Barak Obama of the wild bird industry.

Hank owns a franchise store north of New York City and has been writing for the magazine for several years now.

But his article this month on a nature store down the road imagines something you don’t hear about often: he found a way to partner with a competitor rather than try to squash it.

It’s bi-partisan retailing. Across-the-aisle merchandising. The audacity of  collaboration.

I won’t spoil the article here. But instead of engaging in costly price or advertising wars, Hank took an approach that could boost his profits and his visibility.

Moves like this will be necessary in the current retail climate. We can look back on a short history of failed strategies – or at least strategies that wore out and had to be replaced.

There was the store-growth model. National chains raced to open more and more stores. The more the better. And yet today we see retrenchment from numerous retailers, including Starbucks. Now the company that popularized words such as barista and Frappuccino

is in the process of closing 600 stores in the United States.

Independent retailers were not immune to the lust for real estate. I knew independent garden centers that had to have a second or even third location. Problem was, they first needed to nail the business model with location No. 1.

There was also the low-price model. Beat the competition on price. This is a position with room for relatively few people. You can be the most fun store, the classiest store, the most bird-knowledgeable store, but if you want to be the lowest-priced store, you’d better do that well or get beat.

Even today, Wal-Mart looks to be moving away from its singular focus on price. A little bit. Sporting a new logo, Wal-Mart has replaced its “Always Low Prices” tagline with something a little more touchy-feely: “Save Money. Live Better.” The focus seems less on low price than on the fact that Wal-Mart has things you need.

What will your strategy be? Many of you are trying e-commerce. Others are joining forces with other stores.

The ground is shifting and old paradigms are eroding if not disintegrating. The 1990s – an era that witnessed unprecedented growth in home-related retailing – are old, outdated and in some cases irrelevant.

The fall presidential election, whatever happens, will usher in a new era. Retailers should be thinking about how they will craft their next era, too.