Nike

Its all about change and evolving. I don't feel sorry for the little guy. Now that your sport is popular you want it all to yourself. Look at Eastern Surf and Skate. I heard that is one of the biggest supplyers of skate equip in the country. But surfing is and will always be a fad for most. Their not here for the long haul. So, I'm not worried. It just means I can watch i on TV now and on the free webcast!

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Originally Posted by primo

Its all about change and evolving. I don't feel sorry for the little guy. Now that your sport is popular you want it all to yourself. Look at Eastern Surf and Skate. I heard that is one of the biggest supplyers of skate equip in the country. But surfing is and will always be a fad for most. Their not here for the long haul. So, I'm not worried. It just means I can watch i on TV now and on the free webcast!

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I like this. A good local shop that takes care of all its customers will thrive regardless of what brands are big.

Primo - you do realize that once Nike takes over, they are going to want a return on their investment and that is going to mean no more free webcasts.

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Originally Posted by Crazy Davey

Primo - you do realize that once Nike takes over, they are going to want a return on their investment and that is going to mean no more free webcasts.

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I don't know if that's necessarily true. Nike gets their profits through merchandise sales, not through media. Advertising is what drives merchandise sales. However, if someone in their FI division can demonstrate that charging to watch these events will generate more revenue than sales via advertising on them to a wider non-paying audience; well ‘nuff said, gots to keep that exponential curve from flattening out. So, you might be right.

Also Primo, nice moniker. Primo beer is d’sh!1. 4$ for the 24oz. long neck at my local, happy-hour, oyster bar. Only beer I like that isn’t straight malt, mash, hops water, and yeast. The sugar cane makes it taste like a light beer to me. MMM,MMM good. Not tellin’ you where cuz happy hour there is already a zoo with a line out the door.

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Originally Posted by zaGaffer

Ah yes, the Ponzi scheme that are all publicly traded companies. If you have a company 401K and just press play on whatever they recommend, you might already indirectly own some Nike stock. Along with all of the moral hazards that owning it entails. The problem is, any publicly traded company has an obligation to its shareholders to provide a return on investment (ROI); by one of two means A) paying a dividend or B) increasing the price of each individual share. Companies that pay a dividend are great, who cares If the price per share ever goes up (I do), I make money just by owning the stock (I’ll want to sell it eventually). Companies that don’t pay a dividend are different. They need to increase the share price so that investors can justify owning it by having a nice ROI and thereby making it more attractive to other investors. How do companies do this? By having growth quarter over quarter. What is growth? Well, growth is making more money. Here’s the problem with that. Say you’re the largest sportswear company in the world, you’ve dominated the market for 30 years and on May 30,2010 you posted 1.9 billion in profit, May 30, 2011 you posted 2.1 billion in profit and in May 30,2012 you posted 2.2, well next year you have to do even better. Otherwise, people sell your stock. When you’re at the top, generating exponential growth just gets more and more difficult and you have to come up with more and more ways to do it. The year-over-year growth you generate becomes a smaller and smaller percentage compared to the growth you had in previous years. You’re still making money hand over fist, but that little growth number, gets smaller and smaller and smaller and the company becomes less attractive to big investors because the potential for its stock price to increase is diminished. DELL is a perfect example of this and of what happens next. The company must look in other directions for new revenue streams so that they can generate more income and so they diversify into other industries besides their core business sector. When Nike started, they sold tennis shoes for runners and that was it. There’s only one rule, if you’re a publicly traded company; you gotta grow every quarter, every year, forever. Which is fine, but on a long enough time line, every growth curve must flatten out. That’s the Ponzi scheme that I alluded to; but hey, it’s the only game in town, so why not play it? All that being said, I’d never looked at Nike. Holy cr@p, this company is gangbusters, 15B in assets, 5B in liabilities, a .015 div, and a reasonable P/E. Of course, Nike does have a sh!1 rep, one of the reasons I’ve never looked at them as an investment. They employ children in sweat shops, manufacture all of their goods over-seas and for being so expensive, the stuff they sell is poorly made, from cheap materials and doesn’t last. The quality sucks for someone trying to get longevity out of their gear. I personally think one of the reasons Patagonia is such a good company is because it is privately held by its founders. It’s not beholden to a board or shareholders. Same with In-N-Out. Quality is everything. I wouldn’t buy any of Nike’s crap.

I don’t own any Nike stock, nor am I recommending anyone else do the same and anybody who ever took financial advice from me would be in a world of financial hurt as my two main financial advisors are the Mogambo Guru and the Cardiff Kook.

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if anyone even cares why this is happening, i would recommend reading this absolutely painful wall of text (still a good post)

so nike is a problem but no-one bats an eye about burton owning channel islands???

I prefer to support the local shops and I typically do, however I can see why so many do not. Shop owners need to make some changes, the world / market is different than it use to be, a few things to consider...

A. Prices - People typically buy online because they can find a better deal and not only that, it gets shipped right to their doorstep. I understand you can't keep the lights on with just board sales, but come up with a better business strategy than just simply marking everything else up.

B. Have a professional website that allows LOCAL and non-local consumers to buy online from YOUR SHOP rather than the Amazon.com's of the world, I can't count how many times i've gone to a surf shop's website only to see what looks like something their "buddy who does IT" slapped together for them on his fancy laptop. Invest in your business for F sakes! Stop crying about the internet and get with the times! A legit e-commerce website will drive sales for your business around the clock, whether you are open or closed. This would be a great way to expand inventory while lowering prices (lower overhead) and also would encourage the tech savy people to still buy "local" even though it's online.

C. Hire quality employees - I can't stand when i go into a shop and have a question that requires the knowledge of someone who knows what they are doing and all you get is the shop owner's 14yr old daughter / son or friends running the show while they are out doing whatever is that they do during regular business hours. I've walked out of many a shops without making a purchase for this very reason when I had a few hundred bucks burning a hole in my pocket.... that money could have gone to your shop, but since your pimple faced kid doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground you get zero....

All in all, just be better business owners, it's not the world's responsibility to support your shop, it's your responsibility to make your shop desireable to the potential customers in the world. Adapt to the internet, stop holding on to "the way things use to be" mentality, because it will never be that way again, get over it...

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Originally Posted by ND081

if anyone even cares why this is happening, i would recommend reading this absolutely painful wall of text (still a good post)

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or don't and just keep paddlin' out. the world will keep turnin' either way, thanks though ND081. PS do you happen to know my cousin THX1138? Geek/Nerd joke, what can I say, I'm a computer programmer. Ready Player 1, what!?! I have wondered what ND081 stands for. My guess has been that it can be found on the rudder of a single prop at some muni airport. If you don't want to read the whole post it can be summed up like this: Why? Money.

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Originally Posted by DawnPatrolSUP

I prefer to support the local shops and I typically do, however I can see why so many do not. Shop owners need to make some changes, the world / market is different than it use to be, a few things to consider...

A. Prices - People typically buy online because they can find a better deal and not only that, it gets shipped right to their doorstep. I understand you can't keep the lights on with just board sales, but come up with a better business strategy than just simply marking everything else up.

B. Have a professional website that allows LOCAL and non-local consumers to buy online from YOUR SHOP rather than the Amazon.com's of the world, I can't count how many times i've gone to a surf shop's website only to see what looks like something their "buddy who does IT" slapped together for them on his fancy laptop. Invest in your business for F sakes! Stop crying about the internet and get with the times! A legit e-commerce website will drive sales for your business around the clock, whether you are open or closed. This would be a great way to expand inventory while lowering prices (lower overhead) and also would encourage the tech savy people to still buy "local" even though it's online.

C. Hire quality employees - I can't stand when i go into a shop and have a question that requires the knowledge of someone who knows what they are doing and all you get is the shop owner's 14yr old daughter / son or friends running the show while they are out doing whatever is that they do during regular business hours. I've walked out of many a shops without making a purchase for this very reason when I had a few hundred bucks burning a hole in my pocket.... that money could have gone to your shop, but since your pimple faced kid doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground you get zero....

All in all, just be better business owners, it's not the world's responsibility to support your shop, it's your responsibility to make your shop desireable to the potential customers in the world. Adapt to the internet, stop holding on to "the way things use to be" mentality, because it will never be that way again, get over it...

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Great post!! how many 'core' shops went under due to bad employees??

Maybe if I didn't feel so pressured to be cool every time I walked into the local surf shop, or get stink eye from the young grom who doesn't know a thing beyond what he reads in the mags and who certainly has no concept of me and all the glorious places I've traveled in the name of our sport, maybe, just maybe I'd care about Nike's infiltration into the market. Look who they signed, Hawaiians, the so called protectors of Aloha and the lineage of the sport. Go drive around the North Shore with the giant SUV's and the 'Keep the Country, Country' stickers. What an oxymoron?

This whole sport has been long taken over my the money grubbing vultures. That all started when Kelly grabbed the first 6-figure contract. Even for all the little pesky wannabe pros and all that, there's a perpetuation of the Hollywood desire to somehow be famous. For everyone being so against its getting corporatized, there sure a lot of folks out there trying to figure out how to make money from surfing from being the next independent to that soul sucking sucker looking for a sponsor. Its all the disease.

Even the independent shop owners are whiners. They only want to keep things local so one, they can continue doing what not everyone has the opportunity to do, and to also, continue the spread of localism.

I hope Nike wipes the whole industry clean of all the local B.S., then that way while all the suckers are down there at pipe, I can go cruise Chuns or Pinballs by myself.

Everyone who finds out that I surf is always asking, "did you go to this contest, that event, this party? Did you see so and so, do you know who so and so is?"

"No, I don't. Ya' wanna know why because I was somewhere else surfing on board of my own design and shaping and getting fat shacks for days."

I've made a lot of sacrifice to make my surf life happen, and except for a very brief stint with Hawaiian Tropic, I've never had a sponsor. I don't care, didn't care back when I was learning either. The best part of surfing is actually surfing, so if I'm not doing it where's the fun? Its certainly not at my local surf shop.

They say the goddess Pele forsook Hawaii because they lost their Aloha, and as punishment she escorted the Haoles in. I think the big corporate take over of surf and skate is punishment for all the perpetuation of localism that, at its core, is the biggest problem with this sport, not Nike, Target, or Red Bull.

Ya'll just scared that your going to have to share the waves with a bunch of kooks, but if you were a real soul surfer, kooks wouldn't bother you any more than ravaging locals bother me. So rather than surf the showoff break, I go to the next one down and rip it up all by myself, all day long.

Leave your go pro camera at home, get somewhere where there is no cell signal, and enjoy the ocean for the sake of the ocean, not because someone might see you and think your cool.

Loaded two big ole' shakas for you.

Aloha
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