BRATTLEBORO-It’s the end of a meaningful retail era in the tri-state area.
What wars, recessions, and the internet couldn’t do, the lack of a fourth generation of the business has been the final blow.
Brad Borofsky is completely closing down Sam’s Outdoor Outfitters.
The chain’s flagship store, the sprawling 92-year-old Brattleboro store on Main Street — “The Biggest Little Store in the World” — has been a mostly dark and empty space since it closed in April 2024. But the business did live on in two remaining locations, in Hadley, Massachusetts, and Swanzey, New Hampshire.
Borofsky closed the Hadley store in June. Now the Swanzey store is having a going-out-of-business sale.
At least 20 employees in the Hadley store have lost their jobs, and 14 people more will lose their jobs when the Swanzey store closes.
Sam’s also has offices and a warehouse in Brattleboro, where at least nine employees will lose their jobs.
“That was the hardest,” Borofsky said. “That was the hardest part of the whole thing. And you know, as far as I’m concerned, we have a lot of great people that have been here for years, for decades. Some of them have been in the stores since we took the stores over or opened up. Some of them been there the whole time.”
Sam’s is a third-generation family operation. Brad Borofsky, now 62, came into the business in 1982, taking the leadership from his father, Stanley “Pal” Borofsky, who got it from his father, the original Sam.
But Brad Borofsky has no available heirs.
“I only have one daughter, and she is very happily married and living in the Boston area,” he told The Commons. “She works with special needs kids, and she’s doing fine. I don’t think she really had an interest in this business, anyway.
“And actually, quite frankly, now when I see what we’re up against, I’m not sure if it would be a great idea for her to be trying to go into this business,” Brad Borofsky said.
He noted that the company has had “ups and downs a lot over all the years.”
“I’ve been here 44 years, and you know you can make it through some tough times,” he said. “But this tough time looks like it’s going to last a while. And I’m no spring chicken at this point.”
Nine decades in Brattleboro
Sam’s began in 1932 as an Army & Navy surplus store in Brattleboro.
The government was auctioning off surplus clothing and equipment from World War I: work clothing, Navy peacoats, Army cots, woolen watch caps, long underwear, trunks, duffel bags, rough dark-green sweaters, socks, and tough boots.
All could be bought by the lot, enough to fill a peddler’s wagon, and maybe enough to open and stock a store.
The government continued with the practice after World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam. Army and Navy stores became ubiquitous in towns across America. Selling military surplus products was a good way for people wounded by the Great Depression to get a toehold into economic security.
For the Borofsky clan, the stores ran in the family. Sam Borofsky had a brother in Claremont, New Hampshire, with an Army and Navy store.
“And somebody had a store in Peterborough, and our extended family had a number of stores in different places like Greenfield and. obviously, Keene,” Brad Borofsky said. “So there were a number of stores. And a number of my cousins were involved in the business. We’ve been the last ones for quite some time now — I’m going to say for at least 20 years.”
Army and Navy stores eventually morphed according to the wishes and tastes of their owners. Some went for the hippie look — for a long while, they were the only stores where kids could buy blue jeans. Some sold flashy brands like Puma sneakers and Frye boots. Some, like Sam’s, became outdoor emporiums where you could buy everything from camping gear to rifles to swim goggles to kayaks.
In a 2004 interview for Vermont Business Magazine (now VermontBiz), Pal Borofsky talked about the business and its origins.
“My father started the store,” Pal said then. “Sam Borofsky, his name was. He came from New York. He had a delicatessen in the city, and he peddled ice and fuel for starters with my grandfather. They were immigrants from Russia. They came over about 1911. He peddled fruit and groceries for a while, then went into the delicatessen business. He sold that business to his brother-in-law, and I guess he might have peddled after that.
“Then my uncle in Keene had a store. He bought the Brattleboro store from a guy in Northampton and asked my father to come and work with him.
“My father said, ‘Look, I can’t work for anybody else. I got to work for myself. Either I buy the store from you, or I’ll find something else.’ So he bought the store from my uncle. That was in 1932, and the rest is kind of history. It just grew and grew and grew.”
The name changed with the business.
“My father called it ‘Army & Navy’ to begin with,” Pal said. “But there were a lot of Army & Navy stores all over, so he put ‘Sam’s’ on it. Then he had ‘Sam’s Army & Navy Department Store.’ And when I came, I made the ‘Sam’s’ bigger and the ‘Army & Navy’ smaller.
“I hated to get away from it because it had been successful. First we answered the phone with, ‘Army & Navy store.’ When I started, I said, ‘Good afternoon, Sam’s.’ The customer would say, ‘Is this the Army & Navy store?’ After a while, I said, ‘People want the Army & Navy store. Let them have it.’
“Finally, one day I picked up the phone and said ‘Army & Navy,’ and they said, ‘Is this Sam’s?’ And I realized we had made the switch.”
Sam’s grew and expanded over the ensuring decades.
“Ever hear about the farmer who lifts a little calf every day? He lifts the same calf, and one day it’s a full cow and he lifts a full cow,” said Pal. “I think that’s what happens in this business when you grow into it and it expands around you, and you enjoy what you do.”
Then came an unexpected growth opportunity — the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020–21.
“It did help business,” Brad said. “The first year after Covid, everyone was going outdoors. So people were going camping like never before. They were doing outdoor activities, and they were buying kayaks like crazy.”
Unfortunately, the market became flooded with merchandise, and the market “just died down to nothing.”
“So then it was very difficult to say to sell a kayak after so many kayaks got sold in such a short period of time,” said Brad. “I guess I heard the same thing about bicycles, which we never sold.”
Pal Borofsky happened to be in the office when The Commons called last month. He is 92 now and living in a residence home in Keene. His health, he says, is “great.”
Pal said he was sad about all the Sam’s stores closing.
“It’s kind of sad, but due to conditions there now, I think it’s inevitable,” he said. “This kind of a retailer is going to be history pretty soon.”
Changing times
Closing the Brattleboro store was the first move. For one thing, it was too expensive to run. It had four entrances, which meant it had to staff four cashier’s stations. Business was not good enough to support the expenses, Brad Borofsky said.
“Plus, our overhead was too high,” he said. “We had a lot of warehouse help and a lot of office help, and you know that grew up out of having three stores. Certainly, we were sharing the expenses, and you know it didn’t cut the warehouse and office expenses in any real way quickly enough to try to turn things around.”
Salaries went up through the years.
“If you look at our history and how much salaries and pay went up over the years, the increase is at least doubled in the last six or eight years,” Brad said — yet, even with higher wages, “it just doesn’t seem like enough to attract the right people.”
“And our next biggest expense is healthcare, and I don’t have to tell you that that’s been going up,” he continued.
And then, inflation.
“Because of the present situation we’re living in, prices were going up all over the place,” Brad said. “They were actually going to go up 8–10% for this year to begin with. And now I know some of the companies are sending out new pricing, and they’re going up even higher.”
Brad said the outdoor industry has changed, and not for the better. He listed a variety of merchandising challenges that have recently emerged.
“In our type of a smaller business, a family-owned business, we have always gone to find new brands that nobody’d ever seen or heard of, and then bring those brands in and see if they had some success and grow them as much as we could,” he said.
“And then, typically, once we grow them and they get pretty good, then those vendors start selling them to other, bigger stores. And the next thing you know, the prices are being a little bit beat up, and a lot of the stuff’s being sold online,” Brad continued.
But “there’s no national trade show that everybody can agree to attend at this point,” he said. “And so now there’s no place for us to go, really, to see all the new stuff that might be what we’re doing really well with six or eight or 10 years from now.”
At the same time, many of the big brands have stopped doing business with smaller, family-owned businesses.
“They’ve tried to cut their smaller independent retailers out to help their expense situation, and they’re only selling to some of the big guys,” Brad said. “That hasn’t happened with a lot of them, but it’s happened with enough of them so that it’s a concern.”
Much of the merchandise that Sam’s sells can be bought online, and some of it can be bought directly there from vendors who used to sell to Sam’s.
“I would say the actual biggest long-term problem that I see is that our own vendors that we’re buying our merchandise from are directly competing against us,” Brad said. “They’re putting the merchandise on sale on a pretty regular basis and giving people free freight.”
And at the same time, “they’re trying to tell all the retailers exactly what price they can sell the merchandise for,” he continued. “And if they’re telling us that we can put merchandise on sale, they actually give us a date range where we’re allowed to put it on sale, and the only reason is because they’re planning on putting it on sale at the same time.
“The whole competitive nature of free trade is not what it once was for a small independent business or a retail store like ours,” Brad said.
Another problem has been credit and debit cards, he said.
“When I first started here, I’m going to bet we didn’t even have 5% of our sales being charged to credit cards and debit cards back then,” he said. “Nobody even had debit cards, and now over 90 or 95% of our business is done with credit cards and debit cards. So there’s more of a cut coming out of that as well.”
One thing that was not detrimental was the location of the two surviving stores.
“I just want to say that the towns of Hadley and Swanzey are incredibly great towns to do business in,” Borofsky said. “They were fantastic. They both rolled out the red carpet for us and treated us amazing the whole time we were there.”
Facing all these problems, Brad tried selling the two stores.
“If I was younger, I would think about trying to stretch it out,” he said. “But being of retirement age and thinking it would take more than two or three years to get things going on the right track, we put the business up for sale about three years ago.”
After closing the Brattleboro store, they “had some interest” in the other two stores. “We had some interest, and we got really really close,” Brad said. “As a matter of fact, in the middle of December this past year, I thought we maybe had a done deal.”
The deal fell through.
“And that was the last real offer we had,” Brad said. “The only other decision was — and it wasn’t really hard to make, based upon how we performed the last couple of years — to close the business so that we could stop losing money.”
The Brattleboro warehouse is mostly closed now, and Sam’s in Swanzey is running a going-out-of-business sale.
“We had to move all the merchandise into the Keene store from the Hadley store, and now we’re just moving a little bit of stuff around, not very much at all,” Brad said. “We’ve actually been moving office furniture and desks and stuff like that. We didn’t bring any new merchandise in for 2026, so we haven’t had any new merchandise to deal with.”
Brad said that once the Keene store is closed on Saturday, Aug. 29, and the business operations wind down, he will retire.
“This type of business turns you into a morning person, so hopefully I can change that at some particular point,” he said. “But I’m just going to try to work on my yard and stuff, and I’m going to go hiking and walking. And I bought my first ski pass in six years.”
Brad Borofsky said that “maybe something else will happen, and I’ll come up with some new purpose in life after we’re all done.”
“But I haven’t really come up with anything at this particular point, other than trying to stay busy,” he said.
This News item by Joyce Marcel was written for The Commons.