Authenticity is Gold Currency– And REI Just Abandoned It
A canary in the coal mine of profit over people
Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week: when experiences mean nothing.
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Course 1
The Main: Severance-style McDonald’s
The first time I visited Boulder, Colorado, it felt like I stepped into an REI without borders. Every aisle disguised as a street, Subaru Outbacks showcasing the utility of Thule bike racks. All the latest color combinations of Cotopaxi displayed on real-life mannequins as they walked down the street. I half expected a Green Vest to appear and act as a crossing guard. Situated in the shadow of the Flatirons, in the foothills of the Front Range that extends the whole way up to Wyoming, the place is an outdoor mecca.
The inverse is also true– REI feels like a Boulder with borders. The outdoors brought inside, for anyone and for all. True, it may not have the mountains of Cabela’s or the fish tanks of Bass Pro Shops, but it has everything else, specifically, everything you need to experience the outdoors. From sleeping bags rated for the arctic cold to backpacking tents to waterproof jackets and hiking boots– everything you need to face the wild exists within their walls.
My relationship with REI goes back a long way. In college, REI was my go-to resource in prepping for canoe trips in the Florida Everglades, filling MSR tanks and resupplying any missing gear. I bought my first tent from REI, a Kelty Vortex that held up for over a decade of all-weather, four-season camping. My second tent was an REI Base Camp, which my family uses right now. At this point in life, I just ask for REI gift cards for my birthday or Christmas, because it’s an unwritten law of physics that you can never have enough camping gear. The co-op dividends are just icing on the cake.
I grew up camping and learning the basics of outdoor survival, so I generally know what I’m doing when it comes to the outdoors. But that’s not the case for many customers who step into an REI. It’s something I took for granted, and still do: The fact that most people don’t know how to start a fire with flint and steel, or how to fit a hiking pack frame to their bodies, or how much a rain fly matters at 3 a.m. during a torrential downpour.
For those people, there are the Green Vests. In general terms, Green Vests are the in-store experts at REI, employees who have accumulated a wealth of knowledge about the outdoors and the gear to get you there. They take pride in this, and buy into the ethos of REI, a “consumer co-operative that exists to inspire and equip everyone to get outside,” according to the values on REI’s website. Over the years, the Green Vests have also led in-store classes designed to help people learn about outdoor-related activities, from basic to advanced courses in subjects ranging from map orienteering to basic bicycle repair to rock climbing. Oftentimes, these in-store classes were free or reasonably priced, a service to the public.
In addition to the in-store classes, REI also had Experiences, which took the knowledge from the indoor classes and applied it to the outdoors. This included hikes, tours, excursions, and so on.
In a memo sent out this week, CEO Eric Artz announced that REI is exiting the Experience business to focus on “sustainable, profitable growth,” which is corporate speak for: if it doesn’t show black on the balance sheet, it has to go. The decision eliminated jobs for 180 full-time employees and 248 part-time guides.
As you can imagine, this decision wasn’t great for employee morale. Go on Reddit or any one of the employee-run Instagram accounts dedicated to union organization and you’ll see that the mood is more sour than a sawdust latrine in July. There’s a pervasive sense that leadership doesn’t care for the Green Vests, just green investments.
According to leadership, on paper, the Experiences segment was a loss since its inception. The cost of moving things to the outdoors (funny, because REI’s motto is “Opt Outside”) exceeded the resources and employee time that went into them. Maybe they were positioned as loss leaders, taking a hit to get customers to gear up before hitting the trails. Either way, it wasn’t performing to expectations and it had to go. I want to believe that it was a good decision, and maybe it is in the short term. But long term, I suspect that it’s not.
Here’s why:
I understand how business works. I understand that if you’re losing money on a segment, then it needs to be examined for efficacy. If you’re hemorrhaging money in one area, it can lead to bleeding in other areas, which can bring the entire business down over time. Sometimes the tree needs to be pruned. However, sometimes the pruning shears are a bit too clip happy, going snip-snip at the first sign of blight. Sometimes a healthy branch gets chopped off when, really, the whole tree is sick.
As with life experiences, there are certain things in business that aren’t quantifiable, that can’t be seen in balance sheets and profit and loss statements or YoY growth metrics and quarterly reports. There are human elements– angles of authenticity– that are impossible to assign value to. It’s something that any successful small business sees on a daily basis, but that’s almost always lost in the thin air of the corporate stratosphere.
We’ve all seen this, over and over again. A business starts out with a human touch– maybe personalized emails from the owner thanking you for your purchase, hand-stitched labels on garments, stickers in the mail. An electrician replaces a light bulb for free, or you call customer service and get an actual person. There’s something tangible about those experiences and it’s what makes a business grow. It cares about people and that earns their trust. Eventually, more people want to use that business and it grows beyond its capacity to handle day-to-day operations; oftentimes it takes on outside capital to keep up, other times it’s bought out or goes public. The owners promise nothing will change, but everything does. The revenue goes up but the quality goes down, the authenticity plummets and the loyal consumer leaves. It happens more often than not.
All of this hits home for me. As someone who’s an REI co-op member and who works in the “creator for consumers” space, I have seen the way this plays out, when brands and influencers sacrifice their values for the sake of profit.
Which is why I think authenticity is the only currency that matters if you want to build something worth buying.
A Running World
When I first started running nearly a decade ago, I searched out anything that would teach me more about the sport. Every book the library had, from “What I Think About When I Think About Running” by Haruki Murakami to “Duel in the Sun,” the story of the 1982 Boston Marathon battle between Dick Beardsley and Alberto Salazar, to “Marathon Man,” the autobiography of Bill Rodgers, four-time Boston Marathon winner and overall legend of the sport. The runner’s high got me good and I was obsessed with it all.
I needed more running, at all times, via all media. As a longtime podcast listener, I searched out something that could scratch the audio itch. In terms of running podcasts, there wasn’t much around back in 2016, both in quantity and quality. However, Runner’s World, the largest running publication in the world, had recently started a podcast. It featured then-editor-in-chief David Willey as the host of the weekly podcast, with a rolling roster of co-hosts from the publication, from reporters to everyday staffers. Everyone pitched in on some really interesting and incredible stories, like how NASCAR drivers were using running to train for races, and profiles on legends and newcomers alike, from Deena Kastor to Noah Droddy. It felt authentic and real and you could tell everyone was all-in on the production, everyone pulling their oars towards a common goal.
Runner’s World then spun off a new podcast called Human Race, which to this day remains one of my all-time favorite podcasts. Hosted by reporter Kit Fox and Rachel Swaby, it went on deep dives into niche stories within running, focused on the human element (this episode on Little Mo remains one of the greatest podcast episodes ever, which was eventually turned into an excellent book). Both of these podcasts showcased the people behind Runner’s World, their love for running and for the run community, and stories that mattered. They were top-notch content and ahead of their time.
And then, without warning, the Human Race went extinct. As did the Runner’s World Show.
Prior to the podcasts’ demise, Runner’s World was owned for nearly a decade by Rodale, a small publisher of health and wellness magazines. While it wasn’t an independent publication, it still had a small-audience vibe to it. In short, it felt authentic. It could do things like make a podcast, even though it likely didn’t turn a profit. They even had their own weekend running festival in Easton, Pennsylvania, a really fantastic race experience featuring distances ranging from the 5K to marathon.
Then everything changed. In late 2017, Rodale killed off both podcasts. Soon after, Rodale was acquired by Hearst Magazines, the world’s largest lifestyle publisher with a portfolio of more than 25 brands in the United States, 175 websites, and more than 200 magazine editions worldwide. You’ve likely read or heard of all their magazines, from Men’s Health to Car & Driver to Elle to Cosmopolitan (full disclosure, I have freelanced for Hearst in the past). The Runner’s World Half & Festival ended the following year (they likely had to honor the participants who had already registered). Neither have returned.
I don’t know the internal communications of Hearst or Rodale or Runner’s World, or why, specifically, the podcasts were chopped. Since Hearst is a private company, I don’t know about their financials either. I can only speculate on why those decisions were made. But I do know that publishing is a business, and a big one at that. And big businesses generally look at the bottom line, and if a product isn’t making money, then the people at the top aren’t earning money and it has to go. When you’re running a large enterprise, the CEO and financial guys aren’t boots-on-the-ground types, taking inventory of the culture and the general vibe of things. They see a number and they follow a formula.
We all know that everything these days is corporatized. How can we get ads in front of eyes, how can we do it more, how can we make this thing make this number on the quarterly projection. And by everything, I mean: everything. Your favorite authentic influencers and YouTubers all have managers and agents who are squeezing contracts into every possible content stream so they can get their 15% cut. It’s only a matter of time before they’re all under the umbrella of the same agency as one is absorbed by another, the same way Hearst enveloped Rodale.
I get it. If the gold rush is on, then it’s time to strip mine the land for all its worth. But it’s all short-sighted and unsustainable. This is why brands implode, why publications kamikaze, why influencers burn out. If it’s not real, it’s not going to work. And as we move more towards automation and AI and big business taking over smaller ones, what will eventually emerge is the gold currency of authenticity.
I know I’m not the first to say this, but it’s crazy how authenticity is the one thing consumers and audiences crave, but the last thing that’s being given. From sequel-sickened Hollywood to the stale march of Nike to the homogenous branding of every sans-serif corporate logo to the Severance-style office vibes of McDonald’s dining rooms, it’s all just boring, blue-pill slop with zero authenticity. Sometimes it feels like we’re walking through an unbalanced Excel sheet.
The reason for all of this is because quick profits have zero regard for authenticity, which requires intentionality and purpose. And those things need to be watered with time, discipline, and dedication. Authenticity doesn’t place value strictly on numbers and dollars. It values the process, the unseen, the experience of it all. It’s an extremely valuable currency, but it doesn’t show up in metrics. The value of authenticity is a vibe (as cringe as it is to say that). It’s a fostering of an ethos that embodies who you are and who you want your business to be. All of that is lost once it becomes about money.
Don’t get me wrong– businesses deserve to make money, as do their employees. But deep, sustainable value comes from authenticity, which isn’t a number you can see and calculate. It’s a thing you just know, because you’re intimately involved with the process and its outcome. At times it may seem like a nebulous, woo-woo thing, but you know it when you see it. Of course, to make a living, authenticity needs to be tied to a solid business model, but the good news is that it can exist in tandem with profits. It just needs to come first.
Fostering Authenticity
In my own life, I’ve been lucky enough to have a job where we value authenticity above all. At Believe in the Run, we are exactly who we say we are. You know this if you listen to our podcast (The Drop) and then meet us or hang out with us in real life. We created a podcast because we loved talking about running (and nonsense). We have a YouTube channel because we enjoy talking about shoes in a very roundabout way. We only work with sponsors that we legitimately use in real life and have turned down a ton of money from products we don’t believe in or use. For years, we had zero podcast sponsorships but spent hours each week recording and producing content for our audience. It was a loss by every standard accounting metric.
But that podcast is where 15,000 people now show up each week and make it a part of their life routine. The parasocial relationship is a weird one, but it’s a very real one. That audience is hardcore and is really the backbone of who we are. When we do activations and group runs with brands at major marathons, those are the people who show up the most. And we show up because we genuinely love being with them and around them. It’s all real. But none of that would have happened if we looked at our podcast a hundred episodes in and said: “Between recording two episodes and creating cover images and writing the descriptions and promoting the show, this is costing us $500 a week in work hours lost. We need to cut it immediately.”
This goes beyond the podcast as well. We’ve been super intentional about building community around GRIT, our virtual running challenge that’s now on its tenth iteration. It would be easy to just ask Dall-E to output a race medal, spend a few hundred on some Facebook marketing and call it a day. Instead, we chose to foster a dedicated Facebook group that we manage and check in on ourselves, sending personal messages to the participants. We go above and beyond on the swag, sometimes to the tune of an extra tens of thousands of dollars spent (as in the case of embroidering sweatshirts). For this edition of GRIT, we made custom Yeti tumblers for the participants who have finished every edition of the event. We didn’t promote it, we just did it because we care.
All of that value was unwritten until it wasn’t. Our ethos was the north star, crafted over a decade, oftentimes when it didn’t make sense. Instead of chasing the latest fads or trends or copying what other brands and publications were doing, we stayed true to ourselves. Eventually it made sense– and cents. Dollars as well, enough to support six full-time employees and a handful of part-time ones.
Which brings me back to REI. By cutting Experiences from the business model, REI is chopping off a key chunk of its authenticity. Despite its inability to generate upfront profits, the Experience segment was a key touchpoint for consumers to tap into the ethos of REI. Prospective customers were able to have a hands-on experience, gain knowledge from expert outdoor guides, and develop a deep relationship to the brand and its employees. Anyone who’s experienced the outdoors with a group of friends or strangers knows how deeply bonds are formed in nature. REI had a huge opportunity to embrace and foster authenticity for decades to come. Instead, they chose to focus on short-term profits, which will result in less authenticity in addition to lower employee morale. Whatever authenticity they have left will soon wither and fall away.
The most mind-blowing thing about all of this is that outdoor recreation has seen an average of 6.7% annual growth between 2018 and 2023, outpacing the overall economy. As Covid shut indoors down, interest in outdoor activities and hobbies surged, as evidenced by attendance at national parks (which has now returned to pre-pandemic levels) and the seismic boom of run club attendance around the globe. Gorpcore is in, trail running is hot. People want to experience the outdoors, and REI is abandoning them at the most opportune moment to gain lifetime customers.
While their ship may be sinking, allow me to throw you a life raft: the good news for start-ups and creators is that authenticity isn’t a limited resource. It’s there if you want it, you just have to take it and let it guide you. You’ll be tempted to abandon it once you gain a modicum of success. The first time a brand offers you a deal that covers a car payment (or a car itself), it’ll be hard to turn down if it doesn’t align with your values. But if you remain authentic and choose to build and not break, you will be rewarded with a life full of riches.
Hopefully it’s enough to buy a Mountain Hardwear tent and Arc’teryx down parka and Thule clamshell from REI– if it’s still in business.
[Editor’s note: An earlier version of this piece had attributed the cancellations of The Runner’s World Show and Human Race to the Hearst’s acquisition of Rodale. The podcasts were cut by Rodale, several months prior to the deal.
Additionally, an earlier version noted that in-store classes would be canceled. That is not the case, at least for now.]
Course 2
Dessert: A Repast of the Past Week
We had a good snow here in Maryland, so it was nice taking the kids sledding on the infamous Cannonball Hill at Patterson Park here in Baltimore. I’ve been tired of dealing with so many junk photos on my phone, so I got this Kodak EKTAR H35 Half-Frame camera for Christmas to be more intentional about what photos I take. I want them to mean something. So that’s what I used over this past week. We’ll see what comes out once the roll is done and developed.
We also had our semi-annual GRIT party with Believe in the Run at Ministry of Brewing here in Baltimore. Around 200 people showed up for a group run, despite the fresh snow and intermittent ice. I crashed to the ground after stepping in a pothole in Patterson Park, busting up both my knees. Luckily my skateboard falling skills came back to me in the moment and I somehow rolled out of it and right back into stride. Wish I have a video cause it probably looked pretty rad. Afterwards we had tacos and beer and I got to hang out and talk with a lot of friends, many of whom I don’t see much anymore. So that was pretty great.
I also contribute to The Drop, a weekly email from Believe in the Run, where I round up running news and stories in a generally sarcastic (and sometimes heartfelt) manner. You can subscribe here.
I’m also the co-host of The Drop running podcast, one of the top running podcasts in the country, where we mostly talk about things other than running that thousands of people seem to find entertaining. You can listen to the most recent episode here.
END OF MENU
Thank you for dining with me this evening, I hope the service was acceptable. Tips (whether monetary or recommendations to others) are appreciated, but not expected.
Well put. There is no dollar value on authenticity.
authenticity and genuine experiences create lifelong customers who repay for it year after year