COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (CBS4) – A sporting goods store owner in Colorado Springs decided to close up shop months after he started boycotting Nike products. In September, Stephen Martin, owner of Prime Time Sports, took issuewith a Nike advertisement featuring Colin Kaepernick.
In 2018, Nike chose to feature Kaepernick in one of its ads.
Martin then decided to sell all of his Nike product at highly-discounted prices, despite him acknowledging Nike merchandise makes up 40-50 percent of the store’s inventory.
Fast forward five months.
“Being a sports store and not having Nike jerseys is kind of like being a milk store without milk or a gas station without gas. They have a virtual monopoly on jerseys. There is no other option,” Martin told the CBS affiliate in Colorado Springs, KKTV.
He added the Christmas shopping season helped, but not enough.
Martin says he hopes the wall of military heroes he displayed the outside of his store is what he’s remembered for.