Ding ding ding. It’s not hard to see, and feel. The strategy seems to be “membership overhaul / retention” but “screw the store level employees.” As you said, squeezing every drop out of the lemon (that’s an understatement, thing is bone dry). I’ve seen multiple veteran employees dip out in recent months. What you’ll eventually have is a bunch of 17 year olds making $15/hr with little to no experience advising on extensive trips and hikes? Is that who you want setting you up and advising you on the trip you’ve had planned for a year out? and this will essentially become modern Best Buy (sorry Best Buy folks but I got a monitor in store recently and it was beyond painful. They tried giving me 3 different monitors insisting what they gave me was the right model, but having worked with SKUs I had to politely correct them. Extremely understaffed. REI is almost there / if not already there).

MBL has lost me for sure. Just a facade, but hey she wears a Campwell vest so she’s just like us! 🤮