Eventually the company was run into the ground by poor management and sold off.
MEC. One day it will feature at university in a classic case of corporate takeover.
People 'with extensive experience in the outdoor products industry' began running for the BOD. Some of us tried to signal that they would try to sell off MEC to one of the big 3 at least 5 years before they did...
They quite deliberately ran the cash reserves down. They did it by overbuying stock, and selling new stock at below price, and leveraged against store locations to get very big loans, ostensibly to purchase more stock. When they sold, it was for less than 25% of asset value. The sales price serviced the loans, leaving Kingswood with about a 400M-500M$ company for about a third of that.
It makes me sad and angry to think about it. I was a member since 1979.