Why I'm boycotting REI - and any other organization selling out the West for profit.

REI made some of my family’s best gear going back to its inception in the ‘60s, but is now an enemy of the West. Here's why I'm boycotting the outdoor gear retailer and why maybe you should, too...

What could an outdoor gear retailer possibly have done to deserve being boycotted? It’s an interesting story, and one that I have repeatedly accidentally helped to fund. And it’s not just me – it’s my whole family. My dad has such a small REI member number, the cashiers often ask him if the number is real – it’s that small because he got it so long ago. I’m a generational REI customer – and my entire family is now boycotting REI for the harm they’ve done to the West, and now, places all over the world.

REI started as a small Western-owned and -operated business who made better gear for a lower price. They were truly a co-op. They lent to the store aesthetic that all of the gear dealers are going for now, and REI’s stores are being extensively remodeled to go back to. Back in the 1960s when REI started, there wasn’t as much product to put on shelves as there is today. There were a few camp stoves, a few frame packs, some sleeping bags, and nicknacks that started to percolate onto the market. 

Now, REI is a national chain – basically the Walmart of outdoor gear sales. There’s even an REI in Boston, MA, where you won’t find a single person with any real outdoor experience, and where access to outdoor spaces is only accessible by a very long drive in a car or a plane flight. They sell thousands, or perhaps even hundreds of thousands of products. They have everything from propane heaters to yoga pants to camp stoves to printed t-shirts with outdoor brands on them … and flip-flops. As they clearly grapple for holding onto their little “co-op” image, it’s clear their business has drifted far from that – they’re a huge company, and have completely lost the focus they once had on serving those who really get out there with any level of skill. 

So, what did REI do to turn me against them? They started giving away places to sell gear. They started meddling in politics. And they started heavily selling out the West to drive their brand and sales. 

I made the mistake of going into my local REI with the lure of one of their seasonal 20% off coupons. A few years ago, I recognized a problem with the corporation as a whole, and decided to only purchase items that were deeply discounted to minimize potential profit for the king of all brandfucking corporations (REI). I noticed this board and had to snap a photo, which helped to inspire this post — it’s REI telling you where in the area you can use your shoddy new outdoor costume pieces — meanwhile opening the gates to anyone in their store now having generations of location experience in a single smartphone photo. How long would it take the average REI customer to find all these places on their own, if they had to use a map? Details redacted to not fuel an already bad situation.

REI used to only sell gear – gear built by and for people who knew how and why to get away. As they started to drift toward mega corporation, I imagine they started to run into roadblocks for staying profitable. I believe the business majors out there call that, “market saturation.” As in, when a business sells to all of their base market, thereby saturating it with goods that will then not need to be purchased. 

The solution they arrived at appears to have been to start using places and landscapes to drive more gear sales. They started a fake outdoor school, they started “REI Adventures” – basically a travel agency for “outdoor adventures,” and now they’ve started posting local places to go in their stores on a board. All you have to do is google the menu item and viola … instructions on how to get there, and photos of what you’ll see when there.

That solution is a natural one to arrive at from a business perspective – when the market saturates, you have to find a way to expand your market. When your market is outdoor gear, you need to find more people to buy that gear. And the way to do that is to overcome the most difficult part about going outside of the social-domestic space – by telling people where they can use your gear. 

REI’s method for expanding their market was highly successful for them. There are REI stores in almost every state, even in completely urban-entrenched places where outdoor gear has no conceivable use because there’s nowhere within a reasonable distance to use the kinds of things REI sells. There aren’t even people in most of these places with any skills that would warrant owning the kinds of things they sell… but REI sells it like it’s a Prada bag in Los Angeles.

A few months ago, Earth and humanity crossed a milestone – eight billion people are now on the planet. That’s: 8,000,000,000 individual humans. Carl Sagan once said that, ‘if you count every second for 32 years, you will reach one billion’ (paraphrased from memory, pardon any mistakes…). Let’s use that to understand what that number means; If you count every second around the clock every day for the next 256 years, you will have counted one second for every human alive right now. That’s a lot of people we need to get out to see Colorado, Glacier National Park, and the Grand Canyon…

What REI, and other outdoor-oriented companies, have done by selling places to expand their market and profits is to remove the very last protection that remained between places that don’t have or need perpetual human presence. By giving away places to sell gear, they open the door to all places outside the rutted domestic domain, and eliminate personal investment and the earned ethic needed to find and go to these spaces. They remove all skin in the game that once sorted the explorers from the consumers. 

That might sound great to some – finding places more easily with apps instead of maps, by just going to REI to see what places they recommend on their boards, or getting to go on group “adventures” to places new to them, merely by swiping their credit card and showing up. What could be wrong with that? 

Well, the people buying REI’s gear are buying and going with an image in their head of the place they’re going – and they’re painting themselves in the image of an explorer or adventurer. They can now go see places they once didn’t know existed, and they can find these places now without any more effort than finding a restaurant on their smartphone. There’s no more risk in having to go see if that place on a map or beside the road is pretty or not – they already know – because REI already screened it for them. Heck, they even made sure that only the places with excellent social media-level scenery are displayed for all to go “discover.” 

There’s a big difference between someone who finds a trailhead on a smartphone app, an REI-store board for places to go, or a hired tour, and someone who explores places without all of these pre-shopped conveniences. The difference is the skin they’ve put into the act of exploration. Using a map requires a skill-set, and going to the places found on maps requires a whole other level of skill – and it requires risk.

The skilled outdoorsperson didn’t just go to a store to buy their first pair of hiking boots and were instantly provided a menu of places to go use those boots. They spent their lives building the skills to go and explore the non-domestic world, outside the human social sphere and domestic space. They take calculated risks – they know how those risks are calculated – and they very likely have to have a broad array of skills in order to self recover in the case of a risk cashing in. 

What I’m pointing to there is a dissonance between what REI is selling and what the customer is actually getting. The customer is being sold something that’s rooted in identity, but they haven’t done a single thing to earn that identity. They’re being sold “adventure” – but aren’t actually participating in any element of adventure, by the meaning of the word, action, or mindset. In that, REI is actively participating in taking spaces that were once explored by only those who deeply invested in this way of living – and giving it those who only want the aesthetic, and to believe they’re doing the same thing — exploring and being adventurous. Yet they’re not. 

REI isn’t the only one doing this. There’s a new list of outdoor gear companies and magazines doing the same thing. I wrote about it in a prior post – I call this “brandfucking.” It’s a brand deciding that these spaces outside the human domestic and social space are now part of the social space – to be consumed – as a good – for the curation of a novel identity. They’re actively, observably, and provably destroying these places by inviting the whole of humanity into spaces that were previously disinteresting, unknown, and undiscoverable to them.  

Until recently, there was an invisible barrier to the “new adventurers” – where the ecosystem could remain functioning without constant human presence, simply by remaining unknown to the masses of consumers. The act of using a brand to sell gear by opening places to use that gear is a political act of introducing herds of the unskilled, careless, and the unacculturated into places previously invisible – and fucking them up, permanently. If you think that’s hyperbole, take a gander at Goosenecks or Antelope Canyon sometime … these places are permanently ruined.

I’ve heard some call this critique “gatekeeping” – of which I have come to realize is an argument that only a colonist would lean on. Those of us acculturated to open spaces, rather than cities and the human domestic space don’t view these places as being inherently entitled to all that exist. We view them as sacred places that are better off without the eight billion other souls who have helped to create every abomination in history from New York City to Mumbai, Los Angeles, to Shanghai, or Niagara Falls and the like.

Those acculturated to open lands over cities don’t want or need to see other humans to feel safe - heck, many of us feel vastly safer without people around (seriously). We don’t need signs, steps, and infographics to know where to go and what we’re looking at. We don’t think museums are the best way to understand the world around us. And we don’t need apps and retail stores to tell us about hiking trails. Many of us don’t even really want to see people – which is why we’ve spent our lives working to escape the mental illness that modern human society works to spread to every landscape it touches. 

I’m boycotting REI because they transitioned away from making gear for those who knew what the gear was for, and who invested more heavily in making a life around getting away from human domestic spaces rather than their high-paying job and domestic comforts in Whatever-city. 

I’m boycotting REI because of their decision to expand their market for the purpose of capitalist gain by giving away places to drive more sales, to make more money. 

I’m boycotting REI because they are a direct participant in destroying almost every non-domestic space by inviting any of the eight billion people who might want to get a piece of that marketed adventurer imagery and false identity.

I’m boycotting REI because of their involvement in politics by lobbying for the creation of more infrastructure where only their products would be useful. REI’s meddling with politics to shut out other forms of travel in the U.S., other than that which can be done with hiking boots and the other pieces of outdoor costume they sell. All under the guise of “protection” of these places, meanwhile giving the places away to the masses just to make a buck on selling gear. It’s the biggest political and intellectual corruption since car tire manufacturers bought and shut down train-lines in cities. 

I’m boycotting REI because of the dissonance between their marketed imagery and the outcomes they create in the non-urbanized spaces (that being overuse and misuse). REI got into selling outdoorsiness as virtuousness in recent years, and that the lifestyle was somehow the answer and counter to fossil fuels. The corruption and reason for boycott is visible when you realize that their entire industry from the transit of people from their homes to the trailhead, to every single piece of gear on their shelves, to every material in every piece of gear they sell – being 100% petrochemical-dependent. How can an industry that sells virtuosity of nature also be 100% dependent on petrochemicals? The answer is – only with a corrupted lens and thickly veiled cognitive dissonance. 

Everything about modern REI – let’s say REI from about the year 2000 to present – is a sham. The company now serves only the Charlatans among us. They sell imagery and identity that are inherently false. They reached market saturation sometime in the ‘90s, then started expanding their market by selling places. And the selling of places today is at a fever-pitch. Simultaneously, they have gotten involved in politicking and cultural virtue wars, positioned as being on the right side of Gaia … while being entirely and provably counter to that. 

I’m a multi-generational REI customer – everyone from my grandparents to what would be my children’s generation have been REI customers. And we’re done. Because REI doesn’t even sell gear for deeply vested users anymore. Their entire catalog is now biased to novice and resort users. The company creates false image on every level now – from what one can do if they buy their gear, to their supposed appreciation for “nature” (while actively exploiting it and the people acculturated to these spaces to help drive profits); To their positioning as a virtuous and environmentally-centered company, and even their “co-op” image is fake. REI has betrayed all of their generational customers, the people who made their business possible, and the places they claim to appreciate.

The Fleeting West is written by a rooted Westerner with a deep bent for open land, and a deep disdain for companies that brandfuck places to make a buck.