Shop Local

The peak season of web-based gear consumerism is fast approaching, so it feels fitting to step back to skiing’s brick and mortar roots. This week we’ll have a series of articles about why shopping at our local ski shop matters to Powder’s review team.

I’m not here to make the emotional and ethical case for shopping local. Hans Ludwig summed that up very well in this piece from 2016. And I’m also not here to talk about what ski shops have given me, or what they’ve given my community. Anneka and Julia will have pieces about that later this week.

Nope, I’m here to talk about the selfish reasons to shop local. When the rubber hits the road, or the credit card plastic hits the metaphorical counter of the internet, most of us skiers are more worried about our own wallets than the ethereal, often invisible benefits of shopping local.

So let’s talk about why spending money at your local ski shop helps you, the thrifty skier trying to save as much of your hard-earned cash for lift tickets as possible. And we’ll also discuss a change we’re implementing in our reviews to reflect that.

Save money in the long run

The first time I heard the phrase “buy once, cry once” I was sitting shotgun in a work truck piloted by a fellow roofer whose most impressive skill was his ability to hand roll cigarettes with one hand while driving us to the next demolition job. He was not the sort of man who let others see him cry, but, in the context of a cheap table saw that had recently taken off our foreman’s finger, the proverb immediately made sense.

It’s incredibly common for skiers to compromise their gear choices in order to save money in the short term. And too often, it costs them twice as much in the long run. This is especially true with ski boots. Please, for your own sake, buy your ski boots from a good shop, with a good bootfitter. A good boot fitter won’t let you buy the wrong boots. A good boot fitter will work with you over the course of weeks or even months to dial in your boots perfectly for your feet.

Buying ski boots on the internet is a bad idea, because it’s almost guaranteed to cost you more in the long run. Most shops include custom fitting with any ski boots they sell. That’s a huge value add over the life of a boot, one that you’re never going to get from an online retailer.

Similarly, most local shops will discount or even fully comp the price of a binding mount if you buy both the skis and bindings from them. Sure, you can get those skis for $50 less online, but if a mount is $80 from the shop, you’re still losing money buying them online.

It’s easy to try to simplify ski gear to the lump sum you pay up front. But the costs over the life of that gear add up. Some shops discount tunes on skis you purchase from them. Others have trade-in or rent-to-buy programs. Those costs add up over the life of a ski and it takes a pretty absurd markdown to justify losing those discounts in favor of purchasing a ski online if price is your primary concern.

Spend more time skiing, and less time shopping

Yes, I love to peruse new gear online, building hypothetical quivers and digesting all the details of every piece of equipment as it gets released over the summer. But when it’s actually ski season, when there’s snow on the ground and the lifts are spinning, I’ll always default to the local ski shop when there’s something I need urgently. It feels like the proliferation of one-click purchases and free shipping has warped our brains to the point where lots of folks would rather order something with overnight shipping than grab it at their local ski shop. And that’s just poor time management.

When something breaks, or when you forget something important, your local ski shop should be the first place you look for a solution. Even if they don’t have exactly the part you need, they’re part of a bigger network of local skiers that can often track down the part quickly, or set you up with loaner gear.

Get insider tips on gear

One of the most pernicious parts of this job is that I get skiers from all over the world asking my opinions on ski gear. And I’ll always do my best to answer those questions, but there are plenty of places I’ve never skied and never will. You can only extrapolate so much information from afar. Local experts will always have a better idea of what works in your snowpack and your terrain better than some person on the internet.

So if you’re trying to figure out how waterproof of a jacket you need, or what sort of skis will handle the best in your specific type of manky snow, the folks at your local ski shop, who have spent a bunch of time skiing that exact snow, will have a much better idea of how to help you than anyone on the internet. And that advice is a great way to buy once and avoid crying more than once.

Get deals on used gear

Even though my entire job is writing about new gear from the future, nothing gets me more excited than digging through the used or consignment section at my local shop or at a ski swap. One of the coolest things about ski gear is that plenty of it has aged really well. There are a bunch of skis made more than a decade ago that I would still be happy to ski every day. And often those skis are hiding in the used sections of local ski shops.

While boot technology has progressed a lot, there are still plenty of deals to be had on boots that are a year or two old, often the product of someone buying boots on the internet, realizing they don’t fit, and trying to cut their losses. And a good ski shop with a used section can leverage their in-house bootfitters to see if any of those heavily-discounted used boots will work for your feet.

The inherent paradox

Yes, we’re dedicating a week to extolling the virtues of shopping local for your ski gear. And yes, most of our reviews feature a link to purchase the product in question from an online retailer. Those ideas appear, on the surface at least, to be in conflict. But, I’m convinced that intelligent skiers can prioritize shopping locally while also understanding that there are plenty of scenarios where buying your gear from an e-retailer makes a bunch of sense.

Many skiers don’t live anywhere near a good ski shop. They travel to ski, and they want their gear dialed before they take that vacation. Shops can’t carry every SKU of every ski brand. I’ve had bootfitters look at my feet, tell me that nothing they carry will fit me, and recommend I buy a boot online that they don’t carry and then bring it in for modifications.

In a perfect world, your local ski shop has the gear you need, in your size, and preferred color, when you need it. We don’t live in a perfect world, which is why online retailers exist, and why we link to them. We’ll have another piece this week that goes deeper on navigating the dance between buying locally and shopping online to get the best bang for your buck.

Powder’s Shop Local Badge (and the print Photo Annual!)

When I started this gig at Powder, I had a couple of “I get to do this, or I’m not taking the job” sticking points. The most important one was that I was uninterested in writing “reviews” that brands had paid to be positive. But right behind that was the conviction that any review of a ski boot published on the internet needs to include a disclaimer recommending that the reader visit a local bootfitter.

There’s a spectrum of “how bad of an idea is this?” when it comes to buying gear online. Simple things, like wax or a buff, are low consequence and fall on the “no big deal” end of it. And of course, on the other end, are boots.

So, in addition to our usual disclaimers about going to a good bootfitter, we’ll be plugging this badge into all of our ski boot reviews in the future. See it as a gentle reminder to tread gently when it comes to making decisions about the comfort of your feet based on the ramblings of strangers on the internet.

We’ll also add this badge, along with an explanation on any other reviews that we think really merit seeing the product in person, and talking to a knowledgeable salesperson before you buy. Whether it’s an outerwear fit that’s an outlier from average, or features that we think some folks will dig and others will hate, there are plenty of gear items that really deserve a touch more consideration beyond scrolling through the stock photos and clicking “add to cart.”

Finally, since we’re talking about ski shops after all, it’s as good a time as any to plug our return to print. Yep, Powder is back in print, with our ‘23/’24 Photo Annual. And yes, you can buy it online here. But we think ski magazines are best bought at ski shops, while you’re waiting for your liners to mold, or discussing the next addition to your quiver. So we’re offering a 60% discount for bulk orders of twenty or more copies purchased through this link. Get a stack of magazines for your shop, sell them at a profit, or hand them out, we don’t care, just get them into the hands of skiers!

And yes, you can buy 20+ copies at that discount, even if you’re not a ski shop. If you really want that many copies of the new issue, we’re just stoked that you’re stoked.

Finally, if you represent a local ski shop, and you want a copy of that badge to mark products in your shop that Powder recommends, shoot me a note and I’ll get you set up!