Over the last few years I've been trying to shift my spending from online to local businesses. It's been a miserable failure. Hours and hours wasted trying to avoid the Amazons of the world, only to end up having to order online because local selection is basically non-existant. The town I'm in only has a population of 120k so I don't expect to be able to find niche items, but I've honestly been surprised at just how difficult it is to buy relatively high quality items at all in the local market.

Yup, the local markets often only cater to the entry-level, casual users. That's where their profit margins are. If you need something niche/higher-end your only options are to go online. Otherwise you get the usual response: "We don't have that in stock but can order it online for you. It should be here in 2 - 4 weeks."

That excessive delay probably isn't fundamental and probably represents an opportunity to improve logistics and get that down to 1-5 days depending on how niche and how centrally the customer is located.

Amazon is brilliant for charging the customer 120 bucks a year for shipping and not making them feel the pinch on each transaction.

>The town I'm in only has a population of 120k so I don't expect to be able to find niche items

This caught my eye: is 120,000 people considered a small market?

I grew up in a town of 5,000, work in a small city of 50,000 (which has plenty of amenities, including multiple independent outdoor sports stores) and now live in a village of 200 people.

There isn't a single ramen restaurant in this town. Nor is there any donut or ice cream shop that isn't a chain like Dunkin' Donuts or Cold Stone. The only outdoor store is a hunting store Gander Mountain or a sports oriented store like Dick's Sporting Goods. The only decent kitchen store is a Bed Bath and Beyond. The only "boutique" store I've found that I've found reason to go back to is a grill store, but even they didn't have something pretty basic like a flat burger press. Maybe Cedar Rapids, IA isn't a small market, but it doesn't feel like there are very many local options at all.

Sounds like it might be a demographic problem. Slightly larger town in Colorado here; we probably have 10-15 outdoor sports stores, and half are local.

Actually, I just checked again to make sure I wasn't a liar, and we did get a dedicated outdoor goods store but it wasn't until toward the end of last year. I did also finally get a leather repair shop for my boots who also moved in last year. Hopefully smaller retailers are recognizing a gap in the market and starting to move in. If someone wants to start a hipster ice cream or donut shop, the Cedar Rapids, IA market is all but uncontested.

You don't necessarily need to avoid ordering online to avoid giving money to the giant retail companies. A lot of the best small gear manufacturers sell their gear directly on their websites.

And with those new credit cards that allow you to spin up one time use numbers you don’t even really have to worry so much about a small businesses card handling operation getting hacked which is nice.

Not having a central point of failure for your checking account is a boon these days I think.

You often can't even find the best gear at the big box retail stores. Small companies like Gossamer Gear, Tarptent, etc. make some seriously fantastic outdoor gear. You can't find them without some looking, but it's totally worth it.

Yeah. And in the mountainous areas there's usually a good retailer nearby the local REI flagship. Seattle has like 3 or 4 that I can think of off the top of my head.

I will say that when I went to the local REI here the lady I worked with actually spent about an hour with me fitting a pair of backpacking boots and explaining how and why some of the boots would fail when I wore them. I learned more about my feet from her than from any of the other places I went.

You can get that kind of experience at a lot of the boutique alpine or backpacking stores though.

In the US, having a local REI is pretty close to the only good option. Or Cabela's for some types of gear; they're geared towards hunting/fishing. There are a few other local alternatives with various degrees and types of specialization. But not a lot--and they all tend to pivot more and more towards general clothing over time.

As for repairs, good luck. I took something into an REI recently to get repaired as I had done in the past and it was: "Nope. Don't do repairs any longer. Send it to a place in (somewhat ironically) Seattle."

Outdoor gear is an especially good way to shift your purchasing from online to supporting local retailers, specifically because their pricing is very competitive. Backcountry.com pricing isn't saving me any money vs my local gear stores.

The only problem is actually finding a good outdoor gear store - i'm lucky enough to live in a mountain resort town, so my options are pretty good, but many places simply don't have a local shop.

I can relate to that, I did live in a mountain town with some great local stores. However, I just moved to a larger city but further from the mountains and they have worse local options, at least that I have found.

My only "local options" are national chains (Dick's, Gander Mtn, Bass Pro, etc).

Most of Dick's outdoor equipment is hot garbage.

I honestly tried to shop at Dick's, about a decade ago. (I have spent lots of money at e.g. REI [although I haven't lived near one recently] and Bass Pro in the past .) At Dick's, if I ever had a particular item in mind or a question about an item they did sell, whether that was for hunting, cycling, kayaking/canoeing, snowboarding, skating, whatever: I was always disappointed. So far as I can tell it exists mostly to sell high-marketing-spend branded athleisure apparel. Their recent public stand against 2A and the resulting drop in sales would fit with that...

My time, honestly. It takes a lot more time to stop by at a store and find what I'm looking for or pick up a package from customer service than to simply have it delivered to me with 2-day shipping.