POCATELLO — After serving residents on the north side of Pocatello for six years, the Element Outfitters at 1570 Yellowstone Ave. will soon close its doors.
Currently, the store is in its first week of a location close-out sale and customers can expect to see 10 to 60 percent off all items storewide.
“It’s been crazy and lots of fun so far,” said owner Paul Gebo. “We’re just consolidating and becoming a lot more efficient.”
The primary Element Outfitters inside of the ACE Hardware at 222 S. Fifth Ave. will remain open, and the store on Yellowstone will close in the next few months after the liquidation of store inventory.
Element isn’t the only casualty of brick-and-mortar stores struggling to survive in a new e-commerce economy, with consumers turning to online avenues to complete their shopping needs.
Recently, the Vanity clothing store in the Pine Ridge Mall announced it is going out of business as well.
“We’ve also got a website called ElementOutfitters.com, and where this location (on Yellowstone) has been relatively flat, our website is growing strongly,” Gebo said.
The way consumers shop is evolving, and according to Absolunet, an e-commerce and digital marketing agency, several new trends will turn heads in the cyber-commerce community in 2017.
This includes replacing Black Friday and Cyber Monday with Cyber November — an entire month dedicated to blockbuster sales. Also, Absolunet predicts carrying a wallet could soon become something of the past, as mobile, wearables and other payment-enabled tech usher in the beginning of the end for the need to constantly carry cash.
And no longer do pre-recorded, unintelligent customer service voice representatives prevent consumers from engaging in digital purchases, with many businesses and retailers saying hello to artificial intelligence in which smart voice-reps are capable of understanding complex sentences.
“In 2015, online sales of physical goods amounted to 294.45 billion US dollars and are projected to surpass 485 billion US dollars in 2021 (and) apparel and accessories retail e-commerce in the U.S. is projected to generate a hundred billion U.S. dollars in revenue by 2019,” according to Statista, an online statistics company.
In addition to the Element Outfitters secondary storefront closing, the Thai Zap food truck owned by Mam Phranasith will also find another location to set up shop once the store closes.
“They are going to land somewhere good for them where there’s a good amount of traffic,” Gebo said. “I wish they would move into ACE because I love the food so much.”
Closing the secondary store will allow Element Outfitters to be more helpful out of the ACE location and improve inventory levels.
“Rather than trying to stock two stores, we can focus on one and we will be a much more fiscally strong store, both for our website and the people in town,” Gebo said. “This is a win-win and we’re excited.”
The store is essentially an REI on steroids, Gebo added. They sell beer, wine, guns, ammo, camping and outdoor sporting goods.
“We sell pretty much everything,” Gebo said. “And I would like to express my gratitude for the staff who have worked with us over the years. We offered to move any employee over to the ACE location, and most of them are going to take us up on that offer. We’re not laying anyone off, which is exciting to me because we have a really great store out here.”
He continued, “And certainly, we thank all of the customers on the north end of Pocatello who’ve supported this store. It’s certainly been a blessing, and we hope they dive south to see us.”
