Across 30 years in downtown Golden, Colo., Bent Gate Mountaineering has withstood three economic downturns including the Great Recession of 2008 and the pandemic recession of 2020.

The store, at 1313 Washington Ave., attracts customers ranging from serious mountaineers to tourists who buy T-shirts and rain ponchos for shows at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, but it’s facing increasing competition in the outdoor retail world.

A banner that hangs out front hints at the market pressures confronting it and other independent outdoor retail stores: “HUGE HUGE HUGE SALE” it says in big letters and vibrant colors.

That sign, a semi-permanent fixture, is an example of fallout from turbulence the outdoor industry experienced during the pandemic and its aftermath. Following boom years in 2021 and 2022, outdoor retail sales saw a 3% decline last year to $27.5 billion, and independent specialty shops got hit hardest. Half of them endured double-digit declines, according to the Outdoor Industry Association’s annual retail sales trends report, and on average they declined 9.7%.

A banner touting “huge” sales at Bent Gate Mountaineering in Golden is a sign of the times. General manager Ryan Mayer says the story must run “constant” sales to compete with direct-to-consumer online sales by manufacturers and wholesalers. Bent Gate has been a fixture at the heart of downtown Golden since 1994. (John Meyer/The Denver Post)

So, Bent Gate finds it necessary to run continuous sales to compete with direct-to-consumer marketing from outdoors manufacturers and vendors, other e-commerce outlets and used gear sellers.

“That sale banner does a good job telling the story,” said Bent Gate general manager Ryan Mayer. “We had to get a new one, since it was up all the time and our old one deteriorated. Not our favorite, but does the job for now.”

Industry experts say the distortions of the outdoor industry market started during the pandemic when people were desperate to get outside, including many who rarely gave it a thought before. The surge was felt at Bent Gate, as well as the Golden Bike Shop (which Bent Gate owns), and stores across the country.

“People would walk into the bike shop and say, ‘I’ll take whatever you’ve got,’ whether it was a $5,000 bike or a $15,000 bike,’” Mayer said. “Those (2020) numbers were gigantic and unrealistic.  A lot of retailers maybe bought (inventory) off those 2020 numbers for ’21 and ’22.”

A surplus of goods resulted in aggressive price competition, even as participation in outdoor recreation hit a record 168.1 million in 2022 according to OIA figures. Independent specialty retailers found themselves competing with manufacturers and wholesalers who resorted to direct-to-consumer sales with prices that were difficult or impossible for small retailers to match.

“It’s because of that over-buying, over-producing that we’re seeing these constant sales,” Mayer said. “It’s a game that we have to play. It’s more than, ‘OK, we’re going to have our Fourth of July sale, and a winter sale.’ It’s one of our day-to-day biggest challenges, dealing with markdown prices, not being able to sell at retail (prices), hurting our margins overall.”

More headwinds came with inflation. “You go to the grocery store and a half-gallon of milk is now $5.50, after it was $3 not so long ago,” said Jon Dorn, an executive with Boulder-based Outside Inc., a digital media company that focuses on sports, recreation, fitness and nutrition. Dorn sees last year’s decline as a “correction,” though, one of several he has seen over 30 years in the industry.

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“I saw this in 2014 and 2009-10,” Dorn said. “I saw this in 2001, in 1997. You have these periodic booms and busts. I think this is a small one.”

Equipment sales in 2023 declined 6.2%. Apparel dipped 3%, footwear 2%. In January, REI announced it was laying off 357 employees, its third workforce reduction in a year. In a letter to employees, chief executive Eric Artz said outdoor specialty retail revenues declined in all four quarters of 2023, adding that the co-op expects another decline in 2024. Still, REI plans to open 10 new stores in 2024, including one in Loveland.

“Overall, there is still clearly a strong desire on the part of our members and customers to spend time outside,” REI Co-Op chief financial officer Kelley Hall said in an email to The Post. “We saw solid results and year-over-year growth for the first three quarters of 2023.

However, that trend materially shifted in the fourth quarter. We believe this is due to two strong external factors. The first was a historically warm and dry winter, resulting in significantly weaker performance in our cold weather categories compared to our plans. The second was a broad shift in consumer spending towards off-price (sales and discounts), largely due to inventory-driven price cuts across many outdoor brands and retailers.”

Feral mountain gear owner Jimmy Funkhouser, whose Denver shop, at 3936 Tennyson St., specializes in buying and selling used gear, says the decline in 2023 should be seen as a market correction after two years of “insane” growth.

“Any business in the outdoor industry that thinks 2021 and 2022 was a result of something we were doing as an industry, they’re kidding themselves,” Funkhouser said. “There was a lot of artificial growth in the economy in 2021 and 2022 as a result of stimulus money. I don’t think there’s any real reason to be alarmed about a small pullback in 2023 after two years of just massive growth.”

With its reputation as a place to save money on used gear, Feral is thriving. In fact, Funkhouser will soon open a second store in Grand Rapids, Mich.

“Fortunately we continued to see really strong growth in 2023,” Funkhouser said. “We’ve continued to see growth overall in our business, but our used side of the business does continue to outpace the overall business.”

Wilderness Exchange, located less than a block from the behemoth REI Flagship store at Confluence Park, has seen a surge in its consignment business. They also sell overstock merchandise and closeouts acquired from manufacturers and “samples” which they get from sales reps when those reps change over from one season’s product lines to the next.

Taylor Spaeth takes inventory of newly acquired used gear at Feral mountain gear. (AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)

“There’s a subversive element to what we sell,” said Wilderness Exchange owner Don Bushey. “We subvert the traditional manufacturer-vendor-wholesale-retailer relationship. We do consignments and samples. We aggregate samples from around the country. We’re a known go-to for that. We buy entire sample sets at a discount and sell to the customer. Those two parts of our business are actually crushing it right now.”

It’s a model that has worked for 30 years, but Bushey says challenges remain because of competition from vendors who have “bombarded” his customers with promotional emails.

“Our competitive niche has always been curating a very select assortment of hard goods closeouts,” Bushey said. “We buy last year’s style, and color. That market has weakened, because of how highly promotional pricing has been, and how much is on sale. Suddenly this year’s jacket at 30% off is a lot better value proposition than last year’s jacket at 30% off. You can charge $6 for a dozen eggs, but you’re still charging $8 for a carabiner that you sold 20 years ago for $8. We haven’t benefited from inflation. I’ve actually seen pricing deflation in a lot of outdoor products because there is over-surplus, over-production. Demand is down so supply is up.”

Bushey and other industry experts say they are confident the outdoor retail market will recover before long. The OIA report says “improving economic conditions including increasing wages, growing GDP and low unemployment should lead to modest growth” over the next two years. At Outside Inc., Dorn says they see the industry as being “healthy, growing, and growing in the right ways, notwithstanding what we see as a temporary dip in sales as a result of inflation and a COVID hangover.”

And, Bushey says, there will always be a hunger for outdoor recreation.

“It’s not like people suddenly are going to say, ‘The outdoors were a trend,’ or, ‘It’s not relevant to us.’ It’s actually more relevant than it’s ever been,” Bushey said. “People getting out into wild places, that’s your humanity. That’s a part of you, that’s what we do. We hope to bring people to a place where they interact with the natural world, and learn from it, and be challenged by it. That’s not going away. You’re never going to get in that flow state while skiing, or ‘the zone’ when you’re climbing, and not want that feeling again. That feeling is what we live for.”

Heather Hummel prepares to drop off a bag of used outdoor goods while shopping with Parrish Atkinson and Levi the dog at Feral mountain gear in Denver this week.(AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)

 

War is at the center of three of the best new films/shows to catch this week — be it in the chilling premise of Americans fighting Americans (“Civil War”), in the form of the aftermath of a nuclear attack (“Fallout”) or yet another look at the Vietnam War (“The Sympathizer”).

Here’s our roundup.

“Civil War”: The joyless eyes and weathered face of photojournalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst) tell her story, one of an entrenched sense of hopeless resignation as she and her colleagues cover a war that pits California and Texas and other states against the government and its supporters. Alex Garland’s intense dystopian “what if” movie — which is far less polarizing than you’d think — serves as a warning of the perils of national disharmony, constant conflict and the human desire to dominate and win at any cost, even when we’ve lost sight of what it is we’re fighting for. Lee has seen these developments play out too many times in other nations, yet she’s never flinched from capturing the savagery — the scorched, bullet-ridden corpses of men, women and children — on camera. Now to her ultimate dismay, the war zone has come to her home turf, and Lee confronts an existential dread over how her efforts to catalog the carnage overseas has failed to prevent America from following the same path. Garland’s button-pushing feature seems all too plausible given the climate of hair-trigger anger and bitterness in which America exists today. Thankfully, the assured London-based screenwriter/director of “Ex Machina” and “Annihilation” resists recklessly fanning the flames.

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“Civil War” mostly follows four journalists. There is Lee; her adrenaline-junkie journalist partner Joel (Wagner Moura, who we need to see more of); a budding, over-eager photographer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny of “Priscilla,” showing quite the range) and old-school veteran newsman Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson, ideally cast). Lee and Joel are on the way to interview the beleaguered president (Nick Offerman, in what amounts to a cameo). Along the way, they happen upon one horrific sight after another — a gas station where the car wash has been turned into a torture chamber; a lethal soldier (a bloodcurdling Jesse Plemons) with a narrow vision of his own righteous justice; and even a Christmas holiday display that’s equally horrific and comedic. Garland’s dystopian supposition shows us that in a nation when citizens take up arms against each other, it is everyone who fails. Details: 3½ stars out of 4; opens April 12 in theaters.

“Fallout”: Two of the largest sinkholes that showrunners/filmmakers fall into when adapting a popular video game can be: 1.) offending fans by changing too much, and/or 2.) creating a narrative that fails to speak to people unfamiliar with the game. “Fallout,” Prime Video’s eight-part series, leaps past those death traps due to executive producers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (HBO’s “Westworld”) and showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner. Their respect for the game and its scenario — a dystopian Earth more than 200 years after a nuclear attack — and their decision to fill out the characters’ back stories make for a riveting series. Doses of humor helps too.

Told in eight bingeable episodes using a limited amount of CGI, “Fallout” tracks the gory, R-rated-like dilemmas of three characters. Lucy (Ella Purnell) is a plucky, privileged Vault-dweller (the cushy underground environment created for the wealthy to avoid the nuke fallout). She’s looking to save a kidnapped dad who’s now occupying space on the earth’s surface, a scrappy, desert-like wasteland. While on that pilgrimage, she runs into two others: Maximus (Aaron Moten), a squire in the militaristic Brotherhood of Steel who gets an unexpected shot at advancing in rank; The Ghoul (Walton Goggins), a bounty hunter risen from the dead who’s a former cowboy screen star (his flashback scenes are the best ). Each is intent on grabbing a certain artifact, the identity of which I will not spoil. The quest leads to revelations about the underground network, run-ins with dubious characters from above and below and — most welcome of all — tussles with mutant roaches and an underwater beast. “Fallout” never lags for one second and dangles from one cliffhanger to the next. The cast makes it all engaging — Goggins, in particular, rips into the show’s juiciest part and does wonders with it. This’ll be a major hit, and it deserves to be. Details: 3 stars; all eight episodes drop at 6 p.m. April 10 on Prime Video.

“The Sympathizer”: “Oldboy” filmmaker Park Chan-wook and co-showrunner Don McKellar’s series adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a cinematic tour de force – with Park paving the way with the first three, and best, of seven episodes. Anyone who’s familiar with the book’s tricky material realizes  that’s an impressive feat to pull off. “The Sympathizer” skips from drama to satire to comedy as it wraps itself around complex issues about identity, the immigrant experience, America’s struggle to grasp Asian culture and history and the feeling of always being the outsider. It does so with vision, depth and detail. Actor Hoa Xuande beautifully handles the difficult task of bringing to life the nameless Captain, the show’s duplicitous protagonist who’s an undercover double agent during the Vietnam War era. His mother was Vietnamese, his dad, French.

The series opens with The Captain imprisoned in Vietnam where he’s ordered to write down his recollections — which provide chances to flash back to his “Three Musketeers”-like friendship with two other boys, his work and relationship with an anti-Communist known as The General (Toan Le) and his family members, a nail-biting flight out of Vietnam during the fall of Saigon, the people he meets and even targets in Los Angeles, and the insane consultancy role he lands in on an overblown, excessive Vietnam War movie.

Through these experiences, the General also encounters larger-than-life characters — key ones played to the hilt by Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr., an actor who specializes in chewing up the scenery. Wisely, the directing and producing team (Downey Jr. is a producer) hands him the drapes, the carpet, and the entire household to rip apart. It’s a smart move with Downey Jr. providing much of the humor and sometimes the menace in a variety of roles. Also memorable — and deserving of another Emmy nomination — is Sandra Oh, the exasperated assistant to Downey Jr.’s professor and the older lover to The Captain. “The Sympathizer” walks a tightrope but is fearless about tackling uncomfortable subject matter. It’s smart and mesmerizing. Details: 4 stars; first episode debuts 9 p.m. April 14 on HBO and will be available to stream on Max.

“Housekeeping for Beginners”: What constitutes a family in a home that’s filled with queer friends all living in a hostile culture’s shadows? And what does someone who’s ill-equipped to shoulder parental duties do when those responsibilities are thrust upon them? Those questions thread throughout Goran Stolevski’s third feature, a painfully honest, ultimately beautiful exploration of how each member of a resilient, very human makeshift North Macedonia family navigates growing pains once Dita (Anamaria Marinca), a social worker who’s grieving her lover’s death, becomes mom to two daughters — a precocious little girl and a rebellious teen. To pass themselves off as anything but gay, Dita draws in unwilling but sexually active housemate Toni (Vladimir Tintor) to “pass” as the husband even though he’s far more interested in his younger and more joyous lover (Samson Selim). Stolevski creates a wonderful group of flawed but understandable characters and then illustrates just how brave they are as they pull together to negotiate and overcome treacherous encounters. In the end, isn’t that what family should be about? Details: 3½ stars; in theaters April 12.

Contact Randy Myers at soitsrandy@gmail.com.

DETROIT — Once Pablo López realized he wasn’t going to pitch on Wednesday at home against the Los Angeles Dodgers, as originally planned, because of a rainout last weekend, he started focusing his attention on the Twins’ first scheduled game in Detroit.

His prep included opening up the weather app, where he was greeted by an icon of a cloud with raindrops.

“I’m like, ‘Oh, man, maybe another one,’ ” López thought to himself. “You know how sometimes those change? Well, it didn’t change.”

For the second time in five days, the Twins had a game postponed due to rain, pushing López back yet another day. The Twins and Tigers are scheduled to play on Friday night in Detroit, and while more rain is in the forecast, they believe there could be a window to get a game in.

On Saturday, they will now play a straight afternoon doubleheader that will begin at 12:10 p.m. CT.

“It’s the American League Central,” Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said. “It’s a Central special, is what we kind of have going on right now.”

Because of a rainy forecast, the Twins’ Sunday home game against Cleveland was moved to August when the Guardians return to Minnesota. Remarkably, the Twins didn’t have a single rainout last season and did not play a doubleheader.

Now, they have two on the schedule, and they’re trying to balance all the off days with getting into the routine of the season. The Twins have played 10 games since the season began on March 28. They’ve had three scheduled days off plus another two because of the weather.

“We always prefer to play. That’s how our schedule works best. We play a lot of games,” Baldelli said. “Doubling games up only makes things more difficult for everybody involved, but it’s part of the game, and we deal.”

The Twins have opted to stick to pushing all their starting pitchers back a day, with López starting on Friday, Joe Ryan scheduled for the first game of Saturday’s doubleheader and Bailey Ober listed as the starter for Sunday. They have yet to announce a starter for the second game on Saturday, but will be able to call up an additional player to add to the roster for the day.

For López, all the days off meant that he had a week in between his first and second start of the season. His second and third starts will be eight days apart. With that long a layoff, López said he likes to touch the mound a couple times in between starts with the time giving him a chance to work on some things that he might not otherwise have been able to.

“You can allow yourself to bump up the volume a little bit and have some more intent, whether you’re working on pitch shapes or whether you’re working on simulating 0-2 counts, put-away counts,” López said. “… Doing seven days (off), you get to do that two to three times a year. Eight days is a little more rare but (I) don’t stress about it too much.”

While the rain has made a schedule already front-loaded with off days even heavier on time off, there’s not much the Twins can do except prepare to play the next day — even if there’s more poor weather in the forecast.

“We want our hitters to hit and our pitchers to pitch but (it’s) not to be,” Baldelli said. “It’s not so.”

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Sarah Jane Tribble, KFF Health News | KFF Health News (TNS)

For Cindy Westman, $30 buys a week’s worth of gas to drive to medical appointments and run errands.

It’s also how much she spent on her monthly internet bill before the federal Affordable Connectivity Program stepped in and covered her payments.

“When you have low income and you are living on disability and your daughter’s disabled, every dollar counts,” said Westman, who lives in rural Illinois.

More than 23 million low-income households — urban, suburban, rural, and tribal — are enrolled in the federal discount program Congress created in 2021 to bridge the nation’s digital connectivity gap. The program has provided $30 monthly subsidies for internet bills or $75 discounts in tribal and high-cost areas.

But the program is expected to run out of money in April or May, according to the Federal Communications Commission. In January, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel asked Congress to allocate $6 billion to keep the program running until the end of 2024. She said the subsidy gives Americans the “internet service they need to fully participate in modern life.”

Affordable Connectivity Program beneficiary Cindy Westman, of Eureka, Illinois, says having internet is “essential.” (Courtesy Cindy Westman/KFF Health News/TNS)

The importance of high-speed internet was seared into the American psyche by scenes of children sitting in parking lots and outside fast-food restaurants to attend school online during the covid-19 pandemic. During that same period, health care providers and patients like Westman say, being connected also became a vital part of today’s health care delivery system.

Westman said her internet connection has become so important to her access to health care she would sell “anything that I own” to stay connected.

Westman, 43, lives in the small town of Eureka, Illinois, and has been diagnosed with genetic and immune system disorders. Her 12-year-old daughter has cerebral palsy and autism.

She steered the $30 saved on her internet toward taking care of her daughter, paying for things such as driving 30 minutes west to Peoria, Illinois, for two physical therapy appointments each week. And with an internet connection, Westman can access online medical records, and whenever possible she uses telehealth appointments to avoid the hour-plus drive to specialty care.

“It’s essential for me to keep the internet going no matter what,” Westman said.

Expanding telehealth is a common reason health care providers around the U.S. — in states such as Massachusetts and Arkansas — joined efforts to sign their patients up for the federal discount program.

“This is an issue that has real impacts on health outcomes,” said Alister Martin, an emergency medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital. Martin realized at the height of the pandemic that patients with means were using telehealth to access covid care. But those seeking in-person care during his ER shifts tended to be lower-income, and often people of color.

“They have no other choice,” Martin said. “But they probably don’t need to be in the ER action.” Martin became a White House fellow and later created a nonprofit that he said has helped 1,154 patients at health centers in Boston and Houston enroll in the discount program.

At the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, a federal grant was used to conduct dozens of outreach events and help patients enroll, said Joseph Sanford, an anesthesiologist and the director of the system’s Institute for Digital Health & Innovation.

“We believe that telehealth is the great democratization to access to care,” Sanford said. New enrollment in the discount program halted nationwide last month.

Leading up to the enrollment halt, Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) led a bipartisan effort to introduce the Affordable Connectivity Program Extension Act in January. The group requested $7 billion — more than the FCC’s ask — to keep the program funded. “Affordability is everything,” Welch said.

In December, federal regulators surveyed program recipients and found that 22% reported no internet service before, and 72% said they used their ACP-subsidized internet to “schedule or attend healthcare appointments.”

Estimates of how many low-income U.S. households qualify for the program vary, but experts agree that only about half of the roughly 50 million eligible households have signed on.

“A big barrier for this program generally was people don’t know about it,” said Brian Whitacre, a professor and the Neustadt chair in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Oklahoma State University.

Whitacre and others said rural households should be signing up at even higher rates than urban ones because a higher percentage of them are eligible.

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Yet, people found signing up for the program laborious. Enrollment was a two-step process. Applicants were required to get approved by the federal government then work with an internet service provider that would apply the discount. The government application was online — hard to get to if you didn’t yet have internet service — though applicants could try to find a way to download a version, print it, and submit the application by mail.

When Frances Goli, the broadband project manager for the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes in Idaho, began enrolling tribal and community members at the Fort Hall Reservation last year, she found that many residents did not know about the program — even though it had been approved more than a year earlier.

Goli and Amber Hastings, an AmeriCorps member with the University of Idaho Extension Digital Economy Program, spent hours helping residents through the arduous process of finding the proper tribal documentation required to receive the larger $75 discount for those living on tribal lands.

“That was one of the biggest hurdles,” Goli said. “They’re getting denied and saying, come back with a better document. And that is just frustrating for our community members.”

Of the more than 200 households Goli and Hastings aided, about 40% had not had internet before.

In the tribal lands of Oklahoma, said Sachin Gupta, director of government business and economic development at internet service provider Centranet, years ago the funding may not have mattered.

“But then covid hit,” Gupta said. “The stories I have heard.”

Elders, he said, reportedly “died of entirely preventable causes” such as high blood pressure and diabetes because they feared covid in the clinics.

“It’s really important to establish connectivity,” Gupta said. The end of the discounts will “take a toll.”

(KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs of KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling and journalism.)

©2024 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.