DURANGO — A little more than a year before the retail sporting goods behemoth comes to town, REI Co-op’s impending arrival has raised concerns, especially among those who wonder what impact its 20,000-square-foot store will have on Durango’s eclectic array of local outdoor recreation businesses.
While some business owners aren’t sweating it, John Agnew has a less sanguine view of the effect REI’s presence may have on his snowboard and outdoor gear shop on Main Street once it opens in early 2025. The Seattle-based chain has 181 locations and reported nearly $4 billion in revenue last year.
“They’ll eat up a lot of goggle, helmet and snowboard sales,” said Agnew, who founded The Boarding Haus in downtown Durango in 1995. “I had to fight for many years to get the brands I want.”
REI, which has several locations in Front Range cities, has expanded its mountain market footprint in recent years, opening outposts in Dillon and then Glenwood Springs. The next-closest REI to Durango is an older location in Grand Junction, 170 miles away.
In the eyes of Kendrick Williamson, who oversees operations at Gardenswartz Outdoors just a couple of blocks south of Agnew’s store, the opening of REI there is not a direct threat to his nearly century-old downtown business.
“We’re not going to be losing a lot of customers — there’s not a lot of overlap,” Williamson said, as customers browsed a wide selection of fishing poles, Stetson hats and knives on an early fall afternoon. “People are pretty loyal to the local concept here.”
Gardenswartz sells hunting rifles and ammunition, which are not available at REI. Plus, Williamson noted, the new REI location will be on Durango’s south side — away from the tourist-heavy Main Street in the city of 20,000.
“They’re not in the epicenter,” he said.
The epicenter is the 10-block stretch of shops and restaurants, where hundreds of people empty out of the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad depot daily in the warm season to stroll and shop in the city’s historic district.
Tim Walsworth, executive director of the Durango Business Improvement District, said he’d been monitoring the situation on behalf of the businesses his organization represents.
There are more than a dozen sporting goods stores already in the city, which is surrounded by square mile upon square mile of wilderness that beckons campers, anglers, rafters, skiers and hikers.
The improvement district recently crunched the sales numbers for the sporting goods sector in Durango. It found that more than $23 million worth of merchandise was sold last year, down just slightly from $24 million-plus in 2021, Walsworth said. Those figures compare to less than $19 million in pre-pandemic 2019.
The state’s outdoor recreation industry generates $37 billion in consumer spending each year and contributes 511,000 direct jobs, according to data from the Colorado Office of Economic Development & International Trade.
“Our existing local sporting goods stores are concerned, of course, but also have spent many years cultivating their customers and providing good service and products,” Walsworth said. “They know they will have to step up their game.”
Similar competitive concerns cropped up when Walmart and Home Depot came to Durango, but Walsworth said the two national chains “did not cause local businesses to close.”
“We are worried that this could impact the viability of some of our existing sporting goods stores,” he said. “But again, they have years of local experience and tons of local customers, plus better visibility by being located in the heart of our town.”
“Even so,” Walsworth said, “we expect REI to take some market share due to their name recognition and that they already have members here.”
When the improvement district first heard about REI’s interest in Durango, it reached out to a sporting goods store in Flagstaff, Arizona, and learned that REI claimed about 20% of the market during its first year in town — and about 10% annually after that.
REI currently has 9,000 members in the Durango area, according to REI spokeswoman Megan Behrbaum. Durango will be the co-op’s 10th location in Colorado.
“Product assortment will broadly include camp, cycle, run, climb and snow sports — also similar to other stores in the state,” Behrbaum said. “The store will also have a section dedicated to Re/Supply, our used gear and apparel offering.”
REI can co-exist peacefully in markets with established outdoor retailers, she said.
“We don’t believe it is a simple scenario of big retailers driving out smaller retailers, but we do recognize our presence can create competition,” Behrbaum said.
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Corry Mihm, a project manager with the Summit Economic Partnership in Summit County, said the opening of REI in Dillon in 2017 has produced no definitive negative impact on local outdoor recreation businesses.
“We have seen a couple of mom-and-pop sporting goods stores close, but it is difficult to say exactly why — it could be pandemic impacts, aging and tiring of the owners or landlord renewal issues,” Mihm said. “We have seen all of these issues impact local business but don’t have specific store-by-store information.”
But Agnew, The Boarding Haus owner, cringes at yet another big-box retailer setting up shop in Durango, which sits just a half-hour north of the New Mexico line.
He worries about what it’s doing to Durango’s character — and to its sense of self-identity.
“Part of the charm was the mom-and-pop businesses,” Agnew said. “This is another tick towards wiping that out.”
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