Tuesday, March 12, 2019

This ought to work out well

Dick's Sporting Goods, having irritated the nation's gun owners by refusing to sell firearms to legal buyers under the age of 21, is now doubling down by ending the sale of hunting equipment (rifles, shotguns, ammunition, targets, reloading supplies, and I presume clothing) altogether, and will be replacing Reebok shoes and apparel with a "store brand".  Now I don't know precisely how Reebok is doing in market share these days--parent company Adidas had an 11.4% share in 2017--but somehow the prospect of generic shoes and clothing doesn't exactly fill me with expectations of high quality, to put it mildly. 


Or, put differently, Dick's is circling the drain at this point.  Really, it's what you get when you forget that the fathers and grandfathers (and often mothers and grandmothers) of the teens who buy your gear for basketball and soccer.....hunt and take the 2nd Amendment seriously. 


And to draw another picture, my town of Rochester has seen the closing of Sports Authority, Dick's Sporting Goods, and Gander Mountain, and the lone survivor for "big box" sporting goods is Scheel's, which features homage to Ronald Reagan 50 feet from the front door. 

6 comments:

Hearth said...

Well, they haven't done right by the lady weightlifters in the crowd. I went in to try out knee sleeves and ... just no. I AM aware that I don't dress like an athlete when I'm not in the gym, but that's no call to give me inaccurate and distracted misinformation.

So? I don't go in there anymore. Amazon gets my business now.

Bike Bubba said...

I have to wonder what kind of service Vasily Alexeev would get if he were 40 again and walked into a lot of sporting goods stores. Not as tall as a lot of the superheavyweights, pot belly, etc.. One of the strongest guys I know where I work out doesn't look like a lifter at all, even when he's lifting, but he deadlifted 515 lbs recently.

Hearth said...

Exactly. Telling me that they were "all the same" (not true) and wandering off? Forget that.

PS Athletic retailers: Powerlifters don't look "fit" 90% of the time.

Bike Bubba said...

Or put even more bluntly, powerlifters and weightlifters are not bodybuilders or fitness models.

Hearth said...

ROFLMBO. From my experience of having a couple of weeks of JUST powerlifting work - and serious powerlifting - all I wanted to do was eat and sleep. That was it. Just... feed me and let me have a nap. Had to back off of that, even though the lifting part was all fun. I'm trying to LOSE weight and being that hungry is counterproductive.

Bike Bubba said...

:^) Funny thing is that if it's a sport I'm interested in, I tend to try and find specialty shops for exactly the reason you state. The bummer is that it's hard to find for lifting, and interestingly, even Scheel's doesn't have much beyond gloves, which I didn't want because they didn't have them (per Mark Rippetoe) in a color to match my purse. :^)