Ranting at MEC

November 16, 2005 | Updated: March 26, 2007 |

March 26, 2007: I just noticed on mec.ca's front page that MEC has now joined "1 percent for the planet". Great news!

January 16, 2006: Glenda (store manager at Calgary) wrote me a note, which I've included below.

Update: I met with Peter; see below for my summary. Myself and some of my friends have perceived a "decline" of sorts at MEC recently and this has been echoed in casual conversations with some of the staff. It is not even easy to identify exactly what is "declining" or what I really mean by that, but nonetheless I forged ahead with an email to the MEC board of directors (see below).

On their Web site and elsewhere, MEC touts their environmental responsibility. Indeed, this is one of the reasons I have shopped there, believing that it is one of the more progressive companies available to buy outdoor gear from. Recent changes, however, are making me question this: 1. MEC's decision to sell Nike brand shoes. Nike is a company with an appalling human-rights record, and my earlier emails on this subject were brushed aside. Allegedly, the *particular models* of shoes MEC has chosen to sell meet some alleged standard. I find it disturbing that MEC supports a company known to use sweatshops and child labour, no matter the particular details of construction of a certain one of their products (nor the claims of the company). [I've read your literature on this; please don't send it again.] 2. Serratus. The purpose of this company, from my understanding, was to show that it was possible to build high-quality gear *in Canada* at fair wages. Serratus, from what I understand, achieved this. Certainly their products were some of the best at MEC (and the only good backpacks, for example, MEC has ever sold; todays offerings pretty much all totally suck). Dumping Serratus in favour of offshore design and construction flies in the face of everything MEC claims to stand for. This lead me to investigate further. MEC proudly mentions the fact that they dedicate 0.4% of net sales to environmentally progressive projects. Whoopie: 3. Patagonia pledges 1% of annual sales to environmental projects, as do many other companies. I don't see MEC on the list at http://www.onepercentfortheplanet.org Surely a not-for-profit with claimed environmental goals can do better than dozens of for-profit companies? Evidently not -- they can't even match them. Totally pathetic. 4. Organic cotton. MEC makes many products out of organic cotton, which is great given the amount of pesticide use cotton production accounts for. However, MEC also sells non-organic cotton products (e.g. all "Blurr" stuff). Since 1996, *all* of Patagonia's cotton clothing has been and is organic. Can MEC not match this? 5. Where is the local stuff? For example, why don't you carry all (or even most) of Integral Designs' products? A local Calgary company, with some fantastic-looking things on their Web site which I've never seen in MEC (or Alberta) before. What's the deal? You've got none of their clothing, none of their tents [Note: I've since learned that fire regulations prevent this — mike] and only a few of their Sil-based products. 6. Relatively minor nit: why can't I buy a single, light pot any more? MSR still makes them, and other retailers still carry them, but not you; instead, it appears that the discerning back-country enthusiast "needs" wine goblets and pilsner glasses or a set of 3 pots. Do you know *anyone* who carries 3 pots and a set of frigging WINE GOBLETS on a two person backpacking or climbing trip? This is evidently the sort of bizarre behaviour you're recommending to new backpackers. What's next, back-country generators for your cell-phone and laptop? Oh, wait: http://www.mec.ca/Products/product_detail.jsp;?PRODUCT%3C%3Eprd_id=845524442282391 7. I find myself more-and-more measuring the potential usefulness of products by whether they're discontinued or not: nearly everything you've discontinued in the last while has been the best of its type you've carried: Dragonfly stoves; Serratus packs, the alpinelight, genie and 33L alpine pack whose name escapes me being especially good examples; the Anniversary sleeping bag (which *still* has no equivalent); you carry the mostly-useless MSR titanium spoon/stove tool instead of the stainless steel version; perhaps the best tent you ever made (the Snowfield) got turned into two far-less-useful versions; you don't carry ID tape for climbing gear any more (just whose decision was *this*, anyway?). What's the deal? When I've asked the few knowledgeable (see next point) employees about this, they either commiserate or shrug in frustration -- one employee simply couldn't believe that you didn't sell single pots any longer and spent considerable time trying to find one. He failed. I found an MSR 2L pot at a different store that he recommended. 8. What happened to all the good employees? It used to be that nearly every employee was a knowledgeable, enthusiastic outdoors-person of some description. This now seems to be the exception rather than the rule. More often than not, it is hard (or impossible) to find someone who has used a particular product. This was not a problem in the past; it was usually easy to round up a couple different employees who had used a particular tent or sleeping bag or crampon in various conditions and get some very solid first-hand information. Not so any longer (which isn't, of course, to say that you don't have some quality and highly-knowledgeable employees). I challenge Board members to show me how MEC is better (or even as good as) the for-profit company Patagonia in environmental and social ethics (as well as answer the above questions). It appears to me that MEC has morphed from becoming a promising alternative to many retail environments into merely another (albeit somewhat better, customer-service and price- wise) "big box" retailer, interested in selling lots of product and re-investing the profits from such sales into continued expansion (as appears to be what has happened to the other 99.6% of MEC sales in the last decade). MEC, to my view, has become (or is rapidly becoming) just another of the myriad groups making a commodity out of the back-country experience. Please prove me wrong. [Please note: the above ranting is, well, ranting. MEC does provide some good products and services and does, to their credit, put some of their money into worthy endeavours. It's very frustrating, however, to see MEC get worse instead of better, which is what has fueled the above.] Yours, Mike Warren (403) 282-7030 Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Just recently, I was talking to one of the climbing staff as I was buying a bouldering pad and this subject came up. He mentioned that there was a rant posted in the staff room, and perhaps it was mine...The next day, MEC sent me a response:

Hi Mike, thank you for your comments. I forwarded them to the Board of Directors and have attached the response from Sara Golling. She notes that our CEO and Senior Manager of Buying and design will be in Calgary on November 9 and could answer some of your questions directly. To set this up, please contact the Calgary Store Manager, Glenda Rowley, at 403-269-2420. Sincerely, Steve Milum -- Steve Milum Coordinator - Board of Directors Mountain Equipment Co-op 149 West 4th Avenue Vancouver, BC V5Y 4A6 tel: 604-707-3367 fax: 604-731-3814

This was, apparently, taken at least somewhat seriously. Sara's response was a Word document which contained:

sarah golling

Dear Mr. Warren: The board has read your letter, and we take your concerns seriously. We will be discussing them with our senior managers at our next session.

We do feel that you are not fully aware of the facts regarding some of the issues you have raised. Ill address them in the order you raised them in your letter. Your remaining items (#5 and on) are more appropriate for staff to address, and your letter has been forwarded to the appropriate managers. Our CEO, Peter Robinson, and our Senior Manager of Buying & Design, David Labistour, will be in Calgary on November 9. They will be happy to talk with you; if you are able to meet with them, please contact the Calgary store manager to make arrangements.

1. Nike. MEC discontinued Nike products when we became aware of their use of manufacturers who failed to treat employees fairly. Since that time, Nike has in fact done a major turn-around. MEC staff researched Nikes practices over a period of 11 months, including shadowing an unannounced factory audit in Thailand and visiting their environmental team in Portland. Nike has made perhaps the boldest move ever by a brand in the direction of full transparency they have disclosed the actual locations of all their factories. Our staff take our Sourcing Policy seriously, and would not be buying from Nike now if they were not convinced on the basis of solid information that Nike is now using, and will continue to use, only facilities in which employees are treated according to the high standards we demand. Yes, Nike has a poor record but we believe that is now past history, and that they have actually changed their conduct, and are now in the process of creating a good record. We assure you that if we were to learn that Nike, or any other supplier, was not meeting our requirements in the human rights or environmental areas, we would discontinue their products.

2. Serratus. Closing Serratus was one of the most difficult and painful decisions our board has ever had to make, for the very reasons that you have raised. It was the other side of the issue that was decisive; the fact that too few of our members demonstrated their appreciation of Serratus packs by actually buying them, and that market forces were making our manufacture of them an increasingly expensive subsidy by all of our members. Expensive manufacture would not be so bad, if enough members bought the gear. But manufacturing expensive goods that are not being bought is hardly justifiable to our membership as a whole, who are MECs owners.

3. One Percent for the Planet. We agree that Patagonia is a model in this regard, and we are humbled and encouraged by their leadership; we aim to reach their standard in the near future. We are encouraged by your support for increasing our environmental donations thank you. Not all members are this supportive of our environmental donations; a motion from the floor at a recent AGM to increase our environmental donations to 1% of our sales was defeated by the members. In the meantime, we do use .5% of our annual sales to support environmental and community projects, and we also have an endowment fund of over one million dollars. The interest from that is used annually for conservation.

4. Organic Cotton: All MEC branded cotton products, like all Patagonia cotton products, are 100% organic cotton. We encourage our other vendors to make the move as well, and weve recently seen an increased number of organic cotton products from Sportif and Prana. We continue to use our influence where we can to move our suppliers forward. Part of our philosophy is to help good brands get better. To that end, we share ideas, strategies and tools with vendors who want to embrace sustainable practices. Most recently weve been working with G3 to share information on how to green their operations.

Again, I encourage you to arrange to talk with Peter Robinson and David Labistour on November 9 about your concerns.

Yours truly,

Sara Golling Vice-chair, Board of Directors MOUNTAIN EQUIPMENT CO-OPERATIVE

Meeting with Peter

As suggested by Steve, I phoned the Calgary store and set up a metting with Peter and Glenda. I talked with them for about an hour; this summary was written immediately afterward, but I didn't take any notes. Anyway, here is what I learned.

It is good to know that MEC does take member concerns seriously and obviously does read their email; if you have a problem, suggestion or criticism, I think it's well worth your time to write.

Member-Driven

In general, MEC has no "ideal" member and so really does try to be all things to all people (where "people" means "members"). This explains, for example, the proliferation of products which don't make sense (and about which I complained, partially). If the people want giant car-camping tents, the people shall receive them.

MEC's real goal is to provide "quality" outdoor gear at a low margin, with a decent definition of "quality": the product should be technically sound and ethically sound as per MEC's sourcing guidelines.

In many ways, this is probably the source of a number of my objections to MEC: the membership has trended from "hippy" in the 1970s when they started to more "yuppy" now. Hence, backcountry cell-phone chargers and plastic wine gobblets; MEC has no real way (no process and no policy) to "object" to these things if members want them. Also, most new members are coming from the east, now, apparently where Peter pointed out there are no mountains (well, very few anyway). Hence a shift towards non-mountaineering.

This said, though, Peter did have a good point: try to ask yourself if MEC still provides the products you need and want and ignore the others. I gave him some specific areas where this wasn't true for me (see below).

So, this points to it being a Good Thing to go to the AGMs and object to stupid suggestions like wine gobblets and "backcountry" coffee grinders, blenders and peppermills. Also, a member initiative to get a better "mission statement" than providing cheap goods to members would be a Great Thing; merely providing cheap, quality goods at a low margin seems to miss the opportunity that having tens of thousands of (hopefully) like-minded outdoor enthusiasts creates.

Serratus

Peter described the "story" of Serratus: MEC bought Serratus in order to produce packs "in Canada" of a high quality for members. In the last few years, they were selling them virtually at cost (i.e. what they paid to Serratus) but still needed for them to be far more expensive than the "competing" MEC-brand packs, which were sewn in Asia. The shipping of the fabric bolts from Asia to here cost about the same as shipping completed packs from Asia, so they saw two courses of action: cut wages at Serratus or dump either the MEC-brand packs or Serratus. Peter mentioned "going accross the street" (to Coast Mountain) was an alternative many members would take if MEC carried only Serratus packs (as they are expensive). Noting that everything else (notions, fabric) was already made in Asia, it made sense to the Board + management to go the final step and sell only MEC-branded Asian-produced packs (in "state of the art" factories, apparently inspected by MEC for working conditions, etcetera). This was, apparently, a "tough" decision and one Board member resigned over it.

It is Very Unfortunate that Peter and the MEC board took the tact of dumping their Serratus line of packs over dumping the MEC-branded Asian line — they saw their options as one of these two. I pointed out that many people (including me) are willing to pay more for a locally-made, quality product and used Arc'teryx as an example (their jackets could be produced much more cheaply in Asia, as many of their competitors do) and that although sales might decline slightly, many people would be happy to buy quality Serratus packs. Basically, Peter's defence to this line of reasoning was that this didn't serve members' interests (i.e. cheap gear).

Obviously, the reason the MEC-brand packs are cheaper is because wages (and, to some degree, living expenses) are much lower in Asia. Plus, living conditions are somewhere near "barbaric" on our North American scale. This gets into globalisation and international relations issues; I didn't raise these with Peter as they're not really MEC's fault and it's not obvious what MEC can/should do about them.

He did say that "very soon" they're going to be implementing a system to allow one to find out where each product is made and details about the factory in question.

Nike

Peter says that Nike has really, actually improved their sourcing and factory conditions (at least for the "ACG" line that they carry) and that -- since some of their shoes meet technical members' needs -- MEC would be remiss to not buy from Nike. Again it was pointed out that the specific models (the ACG line) contains recycled material, and that this is good. Peter agreed that Nike's marketing tactics are terrible. I pointed out that a lot of my dislike for Nike is the total callousness of Phil Knight.

I will continue to not buy Nike products and don't believe that buying their products is a good thing for MEC to do.

Product Suggestions

I ended our chat with some specific product suggestions, which Peter was very appreciative of. If there is gear MEC does not have, it sounds like it is Very Useful to write to them and say so; they're quite obviously eager to meet members' wants and desires. If you're not telling them to get bells-and-whistles-free packs, someone else is apparently telling them to get ridiculously heavy packs with all manner of compartments, for example.

Packs: Serratus Genie replacement exists now; looks decent (haven't taken a really close look yet). They are working on a ~30L day-pack replacement; I told him about the 33L Serratus one I have and love and what it consists of (sack, removable lid, full-zip, nothing else). He will be sending me a prototype of the replacement MEC-brand one to test out. He said they don't have many requests for large, simple packs to replace the 85L Serratus Alpinelight, but it sounds like they're working on something.

Sleeping Bags: I pointed out that it's very hard to find a quality, full-featured sleeping bag in about the -9 to -12 range. He suggested the Raven, but it's far too heavy, in my opinion. I extolled the virtues of the "Anniversary Bag", the best bag MEC has ever made (but only for one year). He said I'm one of the few people to think this and that they had trouble selling all of them. The closest thing they have to this right now is the Western Mountaineering Apache SDL. If you have/had an Anniversary bag and love it like I do, please tell MEC.

Panniers: Ortlieb. Apparently they are in the final stages of designing MEC-branded replacements for the Serratus panniers (which sucked) which will be seam-welded and fully-waterproof. Sounds promising.

Single Pots: He promised to ask suppliers about single pots. It indeed now appears on MSR's Web site that they only sell sets of pots (except for some of the titanium ones).

Hi Mike, Wow! You did a fine job of recalling the conversation we had in November 2005. I hope you don't mind, but there are a couple of things I'd like to clear up from your posted "minutes" of the meeting with Peter Robinson. Under the heading of Serratus: You mentioned that Peter Robinson was wrong about Cordura being manufactured in Asia. Actually, Peter didn't say that Cordura was manufactured in Asia. What he did say was that the price of our fabrics that are being manufactured in Asia and shipped to us is similar to the price of shipping completed packs. We do not use Cordura in our packs. While we believe it is a good product, it is too heavy and not technically appealing outside of the travel, luggage and the basics. We use mostly 210d dyneema, 420d ripstop nylon and 630d superpack. This is not freely available from domestic mills. David Labistour, our Snr Mgr of Buying & Design suggested that you might be interested to learn that some "domestic" fabric providers are converting to Asian fabrics as well. Purchasing fabric locally works for small hand operations who are prepared to use what colours and quantities/roll ends they can lay their hands on. MEC hasn't operated like this for years. There is very little domestic fabric left and of that, minimums are huge, deliveries can be erratic and in many cases the quality inconsistent; throw in the high price point of local fabric and... well, you get the picture. We continue to carry gear from the local vendor, Integral Designs (Sil tarps and Bivi bags). We aren't able to carry their tents because they do not meet the fire retardency regulations required by the Federal Govt. It is an offence and punishable by law to sell products that do not comply with this standard. As Peter mentioned during our meeting, we still make packs virtually identical to the Serratus Genie, Aladdin 45 and Alpine 60 using the exact same patterns that we used at Serratus but now brand these products with the MEC label using the product name "Alpinelite." The new Alpenlite 30, 45 and 60 are equivalent but with lower price points and lower weights. On a personal note, I must speak up for the Board's decision to close Serratus. It wasn't a simple choice between as you say, "...dumping the Serraus line of packs over dumping the MEC-branded Asian line." As Sara Golling related in her response to you it was a painful and complicated business decision. Did I feel a sense of loss when I learned the decision? Of course I did. Serratus was a part of MEC. However, I recognize it as a sound decision and am proud that MEC took exceptional care of the people through the transition. Thanks for taking the time to provide us with your views Mike and for allowing us to share our views with you. Glenda Rowley, Calgary Store Manager

I did write a note to Peter praising the Alpenlite 30 (the Genie replacement), which does indeed pack many more good features for the same weight. I bought one of the clearance Alpenlite 60's (on clearance due to a piece of the shoulder-straps being minutely too short) and will be using it this winter; it looks pretty decent so far and worked well in Australia.

My mistake about the Cordura; I presumed that the 420d etcetera fabrics were Cordura; I have removed this line. Cordura certainly make similar weights of fabric; my brother's sewing business makes heavy use of them. He is very concerned to use the most-local fabrics possible and will soon be offering the option of recycled (i.e. saved from landfills) packs and bags. (While I'm making this gratuitous plug, he does repairs as well).

I was also informed about the reasons for not carrying Bibler and Integral Designs single-wall tents. This sucks for those of us who want them, but regulations are regulations and that's a whole separate rant.

I stand by my basic point, though: building things in Asia (fabric, backpacks) is not something which has to be done; it is a choice MEC has made. The social conditions in Asia are terrible compared to here, which is why the goods are cheaper: labour-power can be purchased at a bare minimum (often well below cost — the cost of labour-power is the price to keep the labourer well-fed and sheltered). While I have no doubt that MEC's word on their factories being the best in Asia is true, "the best of the worst" is still a step backwards in my opinion. We are not all simple, cost-minded consumers who will "go across the street" (to Coast, etcetera, to quote Peter) if the backpacks are cheaper. Some of us, like me, are very willing to pay more — a lot more — for a product that we know is "Better" in all ways, not just function.

I would have rather seen MEC pursue a path of no-growth and keep the "small, hand operation" Glenda talks about — which could have taken advantage of more-local suppliers. I would rather see them do this in the future (i.e. stop expanding and start spending more on the environment and improving the impact of their own products).