The Fish Hawk’s Gary Merriman Featured on NPR’s Marketplace

Gary Merriman, owner of The Fish Hawk in downtown Atlanta, GA, a retail fly shop he has run for 46 years, was interviewed on NPR’s Marketplace yesterday.  He was asked to comment on the impact of the pandemic on fly fishing retail businesses like his, and here is part of what he said:

“We’re still seeing shortages in pretty much all of our rod companies and wader companies. Anything that’s coming from overseas is just almost nonexistent. And that was the problem we ran into last summer: We had more demand than we had inventory. And of course that hurt. I’ve been getting emails from some of our companies that are already pushing their projected shipments back months, some of them. So, you know, [the shipments] maybe sometime this summer, so we don’t have what we need to sell again, like last year, particularly if the demand keeps growing. You know, a lot of people are working from home. [They] go fishing a lot more than they used to. And so everybody wants to be outside.”