REI Opens Store in Manhattan, Still Unsure if NYC Has Enough Peeps to Support It
By Michael Frank, Adventure Journal on November 22nd, 2011
REI is finally going where only EMS, The North Face, Quiksilver, and Patagonia have gone before…to NYC. Yes, we gently mock, because as New York-area residents know, REI is pretty darned dominant in other cities — but lamely, hasn’t been in the Big Apple, where it can still be hard to find everything you need to outfit for a week of hiking in the Adirondacks or the Whites. REI says it has a larger mission by going to the heart of American big cities — to educate the next generation on the joys of the outdoors, so that Millenials actually enjoy the natural world (and so that REI has customers in the future). But, considering where younger New Yorkers live (not in Manhattan), it may have been smarter had REI staked out turf in Brooklyn, not SoHo, where its 35,000-square-foot store will open.
