Everything Under One Roof Stopped Being Rare

The chain grew to more than 450 stores across 45 states. It filed for bankruptcy in 2016 and was gone within months.

The building sat at the edge of the shopping center, wide and flat and lit like an airplane hangar.

You went the week before the season started, with a list and a kid who had grown out of last year's cleats.

Inside, the ceiling went up and up. Shoeboxes climbed the walls in stacks.

A row of bicycles hung on hooks above the registers.

Somewhere near the back a fishing section gave way to tents and sleeping bags, and a rack of fluorescent windbreakers stood by the shoes.

The air smelled of new rubber and cardboard and the faint plastic of a hundred unfilled balls.

You could pick up a tennis racket, a sleeping bag, a football, and a pair of running shoes without once going back to the car.

That was the promise. Everything you needed, in stock, in one place.

The store was The Sports Authority, and it opened in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 1987.

Jack Smith had been the operating chief at Herman's, an older sporting goods chain, where he tried and failed to talk his bosses into a warehouse-sized store. He left and built it himself.

The gear pulled you in. The selection was the business.

A specialty shop stocked one sport well. This store stocked every sport at once, in a room big enough that a family could outfit a whole season in a single visit.

It did not make the shoes or the rackets or the bikes. It carried them. Its one real asset was being the place that had all of it, in stock, under a single roof.

The advantage was scale, and scale fed itself.

Buying in volume brought costs down, which brought prices down, which drew more shoppers, which justified still more volume.

Kmart bought the chain in 1990 and spun it back out in 1995, by which point it ran more than 130 stores in twenty-six states.

A 2003 merger with a Denver competitor pushed it fully national. At its height the company ran more than 450 stores across 45 states, with more than three billion dollars in sales a year.

For millions of families the Saturday trip became a habit, the default place to solve any problem a sport could hand you.

If you wanted to see a thing, hold it, and carry it home the same afternoon, this was where you went.

Then the thing the store was selling stopped being scarce.

The internet carried every sport and every brand too, more of it, priced lower, open at midnight.

The brands that filled the shelves opened their own stores and their own websites, and stopped needing a middleman to reach the customer.

A rival, Dick's Sporting Goods, ran the same format out of newer buildings and pulled even in sales.

There was also a weight the shoppers never saw. A 2006 buyout by a private equity firm valued the company at $1.4 billion and left it carrying the loan. Money that might have built a website or refreshed the floors went to lenders instead.

The part it had played, the one big room that held everything, no longer needed a room.

The company filed for bankruptcy in 2016, meaning to reorganize and shed a few underperforming stores.

The plan did not hold. Within weeks the reorganization turned into a liquidation, and every store was marked to close.

It owed its creditors about $1.1 billion. By the end of that summer the shelves were bare and the doors were locked.

In Denver, the football stadium that had worn the company's name for five years quietly took it back.

The idea did not die with the company.

Everything in one place, every brand under one roof, is still the most powerful pull in retail. It simply moved to a screen, where the roof costs nothing and the doors never close.

The superstore was right that shoppers will always reward the place that carries it all.

It just cannot be a place anymore.