With small businesses on the ropes, what makes you think your fly shop will survive?

Fly fishing is a niche business within the already shrinking group that crave the out-of-doors experience – and are willing to fish for anything.

If we use restaurants as a parallel, fast food and fast-casual chains will survive as they are fluent in the take-out business and can double-down on delivery (GrubHub and the like) to ensure revenue is coming through the doors. The fancier eateries haven’t any skills in the repackaging of their entrees, and their exquisite plating and ambience don’t play well with brown bags and Styrofoam cups. Many of the better quality niche players will vanish, as they don’t have the resources and cannot modify their business processes fast enough to survive.

Dining within the confines of their establishment is several months away. Someone will sound the “all clear” and the public will dash outside causing a few small spikes in infections – which will be nursed by the news channels to make us all run back inside, and we’ll be shut-ins for another couple of months until the next brave fellow ventures out and lives to tell the tale.

Fly shops and fly fishing guides are like those high quality niche restaurants. Most lack the mail order business large enough to keep them afloat, their guides depend on the shop’s ability to book vacationing clients to put food on their table, and with the public a no-show for the next six months, many of these small shops will not survive.

Depending on where you live you might actually have two fishing seasons per year. This is the bifurcation of the fishing year caused by the hot summer months, where the best fishing occurs in Spring and Fall – with summer reduced to a morning and evening bite with doldrums in between.

Four or five months means the Spring season will have us hip deep in face masks and irate housewives, intent on keeping us indoors. This may actually be a blessing considering anglers have issues with social distancing on the best holes already, and if we were suddenly required to maintain a proper distance, all hell would break loose …

At best that means you might be able to sneak in some fishing this Fall, so you might consider the following (if you haven’t lost your job already):

• This year, DONT buy your tackle from Amazon, even if it is cheaper.
• Book a guide date with your favorite destination shop, for a Fall venue
• The profit margin on rods largely sucks, so you might want to buy a reel and line and a handful of flies too  …

A lot of us will lose our jobs and find new employment when things are more normal. Until then we’ll be more concerned with mortgage payments and food on the table versus luxury items like new tackle or a guided fishing trip, but this too will pass  …

It will be doubly important for us to support the small shops in our neighborhood, the restaurants and vendors that make our Main Street unique –and our fly shops and those quality destination shops that will be suffer so horribly without clients.

I don’t care if it’s a dollar more at my local retailer, it’s time to ensure those precious local resources don’t get lost to the few larger retailers with the resources to weather an economic downturn.

Buy local … it’s time to give Bezos the extended digit.