Amazon is brilliant for charging the customer 120 bucks a year for shipping and not making them feel the pinch on each transaction.
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.
Not having a central point of failure for your checking account is a boon these days I think.
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.
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.
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."
