One of the fun, educational exercises I did when I owned my business was to act as a mystery shopper on my competition. I had a "scorecard" of about 30 items that I used to rate the other stores. Almost always I would see several things that were good and I might "borrow" those ideas. Usually there were quite a few items that got poor ratings, making me feel good that we were doing more things correctly than our competition.
After my poor ole bald head became more recognizable and I couldn't personally do the "mystery shopping," we would send a staff member or hire someone to do the shopping for us. We always learned a lot and always shared the results with our entire staff. This shopping also included the "big boxes."