The fear of coronavirus infection while exercising at the local health club has prompted huge sales in home fitness equipment.
“I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s completely crazy,” said Nathan Person, east district manager for Johnson Fitness & Wellness, a home exercise equipment store with over 90 outlets in the United States.
Person has sold exercise gear for 15 years and said that sales are roughly three times higher than normal, though some equipment will not be available in the U.S. until next year at the earliest.
“We’ve been told by many, many manufacturers that the earliest would be January, but most of them are projecting longer than that,” he said, adding that before the pandemic hit the U.S., “You could walk in and buy anything because we had lots of them.”
To accommodate the increased demand, Person hired extra staff to man the phones.
Sales have increased “across the board” for exercise equipment, but Person that said one of the biggest sellers is bumper plates, which are bouncy rubber weights that slide onto a lifting bar, like those used on the bench press. Other popular items are regular free weights (the nonbouncy kind) and dumbbells. However, receiving any of these objects will take anywhere from 90 days to next year.
“Most everything we have is already pre-sold,” Person said.
Since the start of the pandemic, sales of dumbbells and weight plates increased 1,980% and 1,355%, respectively, when compared to purchases from March and April 2019, the E-Commerce Times reported last month.
Scott McDonald, CEO of Body-Solid Inc., which specializes in home and commercial exercise equipment, is also having trouble keeping dumbbells and weight plates in stock due to increased demand colliding with supply chain disruptions.
“The supply chain slowed us anywhere from a month to three months, depending on where the particular factory was, and then, the demand really started kicking in,” he said.
Free weights and dumbbells are often made overseas, frequently in China. Manufacturing and shipping these products abroad was at a lull in March, since its busy season to sell them had just ended. Then, the pandemic hit the U.S., demand suddenly increased without warning, and retailers were left in the lurch to meet that demand, according to Person.
“[Demand] hit at a really bad time for the industry,” he said. “Everybody was fighting to get production back up when they already ramped it down.”
With essentially no products available that were high in demand, customers were forced to manage their expectations as to when their equipment would be delivered.
Person said that at first, customers were not amenable to waiting weeks if not months for the delivery of exercise equipment. Instead, they shopped around only to discover that the long wait time was universal.
“I think the reality set in with a lot of people that they now know there’s going to be a wait at this point, so a lot of people are pre-ordering,” he said.
McDonald said his supply chain woes have improved since March, but inventory remains low while demand is still through the roof.
“In a normal world, we have very few inventory shortages, and we ship most of our products within 24 hours,” he said, adding that now, it can take weeks to fulfill an order.
“It’s really about getting more inventory here,” he said.
McDonald also wondered when the demand will slow in terms of anticipating future inventory levels.
“I guess the $64,000 question for me is, do I assume this demand level will increase forever? Of course, it won’t, but how long will it be sustained? At some point in time, the tidal wave stops, and you don’t want to be caught with a lot of inventory,” he said.
Person said that it’s not easy guessing when demand will drop off.
“We keep trying to predict how long this is going to go and how much product we need to bring in. … It’s kind of tough to predict,” he said.
