This year’s John Lewis Christmas advert, in which a dragon tries to kill several people then holds up a pudding, reportedly cost £7m to make. And that’s fine. It’s a good advert, and John Lewis has a reputation to uphold, and you can’t really put a price on the half a morning of vaguely duty-bound Twitter buzz it generated.

However, by no means is it the best Christmas ad this year. That plaudit now goes to Hafod Hardware, a tiny independent family-run hardware store in Rhayader, Powys, whose ad cost just £100 to make. Quite frankly, it blows John Lewis out of the water.

Here’s what happens. A little boy wakes up. He brushes his teeth, eats his breakfast and goes to work. He opens the shop, fixes a broom; he cleans the counter and restocks the shelves. He serves a customer, does a bit of accounting, serves another customer. At the end of the day he switches off the light, bends down to pick up a Christmas tree and – PLOT TWIST! – he’s actually a 30-year-old man. The strapline comes up: ‘Be a kid this Christmas’. The end.

Judging by the YouTube comments under the video, there is not a dry eye in the house. The advert is being hailed as a celebration of traditional Christmas spirit, the strength of the independent, and the importance of community. It’s been featured in the national media as an antidote to the aggressive willy-waving we see from brands at this time of year.

Which it is and it isn’t, in truth. While it’s impressive that the shop has only spent £100 on the ad – and that was to pay for an engineer to record the song on the soundtrack – it still manages to crib pretty heavily from the John Lewis playbook. There’s a kid. There’s a tree. There’s a slowed-down cover version of a well-loved song. The only thing stopping it from being a John Lewis advert is the lack of a very polite man whose name is also Hafod Hardware politely redirecting Twitter users to the correct account.

Packs an almighty punch ... the Hafod Hardware Christmas advert. Photograph: @HafodHardware

But let’s not be too mean-spirited. The fact is that the Hafod Hardware advert packs an almighty punch, because of the history of the shop itself. It has been open since 1895, fending off competition from bigger companies with every step; and it’s a true family shop, passed down through the generations. The grandfather in the advert is the nephew of the founder, the man at the end (his son) runs the shop with him and the little boy could feasibly grow up to run the shop after him. Any old idiot can get a kid to sweep up a shop, but the magic of the ad is that it shows the real flesh and blood lineage of Hafod Hardware. It’s the beating heart of the community, and has been for years. No amount of money can buy that.

So maybe it’s time for John Lewis to follow suit. Every year its Christmas adverts drift further and further from its core brand – quite often you’re lucky if the ads actually feature anything you can buy in-store – and it seems clear that things aren’t working. This year the company unveiled its first ever half-year loss, and it isn’t like these things have a habit of improving. Maybe next year it can find a way to use its Christmas ad to remind people what the shop was, and what it meant to people. If it can connect even half as well as the Hafod Hardware ad, it’ll be on to a winner. Especially if it only costs them £100.