The front doors of REI stores are staying locked on the biggest shopping day of the year. 
 
 "We think that Black Friday has gotten out of hand," said Jerry Stritzke, CEO of the chain that specializes in outdoor and fitness gear. 
 
 American retailers have been pushing "door busters" earlier and earlier, dragging employees in to open stores on Thanksgiving afternoon. 
 
 But this year, REI's 12,000 full and part-time workers will not only have Thanksgiving Day off, they will have Black Friday off with pay. 
 
 Stritzke acknowledged that keeping REI's 143 U.S. stores closed will put a dent in revenue. He said Black Friday has been among the company's top 10 sales days in past years. 
 
 "When you close...on one of the busiest days of the year, it's going to cost you money," he told CNNMoney's Cristina Alesci. 
 
 About 20% of REI's sales are made on its website, but the retailer won't try to lure online shoppers on Black Friday either. Customers will be able to place orders, but its homepage will try to divert buyers with a "cover screen" encouraging them to explore the outdoors instead. 
 
 Related: Americans ARE shopping again...selectively 
 
 REI isn't worried that its strategy could be costly. For one thing, it doesn't have shareholders to mollify because it's a "consumer co-op." That means instead of shareholders, REI has member customers who pay a one-time fee and receive an annual dividend -- usually equal to about 10% of their purchases that year. 
 
 Members account for about 90% of the company's sales, Stritzke said, and keeping their loyalty means focusing on what they care about. 
 
 "This business centers [on] the outdoors," he said. "Thus, we can do something like close our doors on Black Friday, and we'll have the membership that'll think that's cool." 
 
 Stritzke said that it's more valuable for REI to bring in new, passionate members than to compete for holiday bargain hunters. 
 
 "You need people to go to the mountain, you need people to catch that outdoor bug," Stritzke said. 
 
 That mantra has worked for REI. With 5.5 million members, it's the nation's largest retail co-op and has seen two years of double-digit growth. 
 
 "There is a lot of disruptive forces in retail. I think, doing retail today requires that you have a very crisp view of why your members or customers should come to you," he said. ||||| CLOSE Outdoor and fitness retailer REI announced it will be closed for Black Friday this year, urging customers to #OptOutside" instead of shopping. Video provided by Newsy Newslook 
 
 Customers wait in line at the REI in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood. This year REI will close its stores on Black Friday and is encouraging employees and customers to spend time outside instead. (Photo: Matt Peyton, AP Images for REI) 
 
 Outdoor gear and sporting goods retailer REI is canceling Black Friday this year. No promotions, no hourly sales, no doorbusters, no waiting in line. 
 
 In an unprecedented move for the modern-day holiday shopping season, REI's 143 stores will be closed the day after Thanksgiving. The co-op business plans to launch a campaign Tuesday encouraging people to forgo shopping to spend time outside instead. With the hashtag #OptOutside, REI will ask people to share what they're doing on Black Friday on social media. 
 
 REI is taking direct aim at the frenzied consumerism that dominates the holidays with a message to do the exact opposite of what Black Friday demands. 
 
 "Any retailer that hears this will be startled by the idea," says REI President and CEO Jerry Stritzke, who admits he was apprehensive about closing at first. "As a co-op ... we define success a little differently. It's much broader than just money. How effectively do we get people outside?" 
 
 The weekend of Thanksgiving has become an increasingly competitive game of one-upmanship as retailers move store openings earlier each year. Meanwhile other retailers, including Costco and Nordstrom, have shot back by refusing to open on Thanksgiving. But no one has forgone Black Friday, the symbolic start of the holiday season, altogether, says Ron Friedman, head of the retail and consumer products group at consulting firm Marcum LLP. 
 
 "Black Friday historically is the most important retail day of the year," he says. "It's like a national holiday." 
 
 REI is hoping to convince consumers to start a new Black Friday tradition, one that doesn't involve buying anything. It has built a dedicated #OptOutside website with resources on local hiking trails. REI's campaign was built with its employees and customers in mind — the company operates as a co-op, with roughly 5.5 million members who pay a one-time fee for a share of the business. Members contribute to at least 80% of REI's sales. 
 
 REI will have no Black Friday promotions and won't process any online orders until Saturday. Just a small handful of its approximately 12,000 employees will be on call, while the rest get a paid day off. 
 
 The decision to close on Black Friday is bold in an industry that has practically made the day a mandatory part of business, not only because customers demand it, but because the bottom line often does, too. The holiday shopping season is the biggest, and most competitive, time of year for retailers, with Black Friday at the center of the hoopla. 
 
 Last year, 86.9 million people shopped on Black Friday, according to the National Retail Federation, and recent years have seen the typically one-day blowout sale bleed into the entire week, and promotions running through November and December as retailers try to keep consumers shopping. That trend has also cut into the sales Black Friday weekend normally brings in. The number of Black Friday shoppers last year fell from the year before, and the amount the average shopper spent over the entire weekend was down 6.4% from 2013, according to NRF. 
 
 Still, for REI, which ended 2014 with $2.2 billion in sales, Black Friday has consistently been a top 10 sales day. Stritzke acknowledges the business is taking a risk by closing, but he's more concerned with the message the company sends to consumers. 
 
 "The thing that is powerful to me is this clearly is not a financially self-serving act," he says. "It's an act where we're really making a very clear statement about a set of values." 
 
 As a smaller, niche retailer, and a co-op, REI is in a better position to get away with closing on such a huge sales day, says Ken Perkins, president of research and data firm Retail Metrics. 
 
 "It makes it a lot easier for them to do this than it would for a publicly traded company," he says. REI has also never been a huge discounter anyway, he says, and doesn't necessarily compete with major retailers such as Target and Macy's. 
 
 For Brian Harrower, store manager at the REI in Bloomington, Minn., this year marks the first time in his 25-year retail career that he'll have Black Friday off. He already has plans to organize an ice hockey tournament. 
 
 "Somebody has to be the one to kind of put their flag in the sand and say enough is enough," he says. "That's what #OptOutside is for us, is saying we're going to be the first, we think this doesn't make sense anymore, it's not healthy. And an outdoor life is a healthy life." 
 
 It didn't cross Harrower's mind to spend the day shopping, because "there's so many other days to get the same deals," he says. 
 
 Hadley Malcolm on Twitter: @hadleypdxdc. 
 
 Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1N3jH3C ||||| REI, the Seattle-based outdoor recreation and sporting goods giant, announced today that it is going to close for Black Friday (you read that right) and pay its 12,000 employees to go out and play. REI is also encouraging other companies to join them in what they describe as a stand against the commercial madness that's characterized the day after Thanksgiving for at least a decade and a half. 
 
 Of course I, as a customer experience consultant, would almost never advise a client to close up shop on one of the busiest days of the shopping year. Yet in this case, for reasons I'll discuss below, it looks like REI is on-trend with this brave and expensive move. (Color its move highly expensive: REI says it will be closing each of their 143 stores on this high-volume sales day and, as they put it, "paying our employees to head outside.”) 
 
 REI is one of the most powerful forces in outdoor retailing, with over $2 billion in sales in 2014. But it’s also a member-owned cooperative (REI's more than 5 million members pay a one-time fee and contribute some 80% of its sales). As such, according to President and CEO Jerry Stritzke, this new move aligns with REI's mission that "being outside makes our lives better.” 
 
 CEO Stritzke: "For 76 years, our co-op has been dedicated to one thing and one thing only: a life outdoors. We believe that being outside makes our lives better. And Black Friday is the perfect time to remind ourselves of this essential truth. We’re a different kind of company—and while the rest of the world is fighting it out in the aisles, we’ll be spending our day a little differently. We’re choosing to opt outside, and want you to come with us." 
 
 So what are the implications of this wildly counterintuitive move? Well, they may not be as commercially suicidal as they look at first glance. 
 
 What REI is doing here is well aligned with some important trends among customers today (trends, by the way, that I explore at length in Your Customer Is The Star: How To Make Millennials, Boomers And Everyone Else Love Your Business, my recent book for Forbes Signature Series). 
 
 Including, in particular, the following two: 
 
 • Customers’ desire for authenticity: An authentic brand voice is important to customers today: A legitimate backstory, and your company name meaning something and standing for something. In the arena of outdoor retailing, the most visible master of this has been Patagonia, in part because of its incomparable founder, Yvon Chouinard, the epitome of a warts-and-all brand spokesman. Taking a stand such as REI is doing on Black Friday is a bold step toward making REI visibly authentic as well. 
 
 • Customers' search for attached meaning: Customers today strive to align their purchases with their values (at least where they can afford to do so). They are fans of “attached meaning”: getting something more (a social good) along with their purchase, in addition to the good or service received. After year after year of horror stories on worker mistreatment in ’s warehouses (mistreatment that apparently continues without abatement), a feel-good story about how one company is treating at least its retail workers is going to attach a better meaning to a purchase from REI than to one made elsewhere. 
 
 On the other hand 
 
 On the other hand, customers want, and expect, convenience. The trends are moving strongly toward longer sales and support hours and wider "omnichannel" availability, rather than the opposite. And one of my customer experience rules with almost universal applicability is that inconveniencing your customers for the sake of your own internal, corporate rituals is a bad move to make. 
 
 However, REI is betting that for many customers, the real inconvenience of Black Friday is feeling obligated to join the shopping frenzy of, as their CEO puts it, “fighting it out in the aisle.” And, as REI's marketing materials make clear, if you really insist on shopping with them on Black Friday, the REI website (staffed by a skeleton crew for the day), will still be open. 
 
 Also on Forbes: 
 
 Micah Solomon is a customer experience consultant, customer service speaker and bestselling business author, most recently of High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service
– Outdoor-goods chain REI has flabbergasted retail analysts with its bold Black Friday plan of not selling anything. CEO Jerry Stritzke says the day has "gotten out of hand" and all 143 REI stores will remain closed the day after Thanksgiving, CNNMoney reports. The chain is paying all 12,000 workers for the day and is encouraging them—and its customers—to enjoy the great outdoors on Black Friday and share their experiences with the #OptOutside tag. The chain will not be processing online orders until Saturday, reports USA Today, which notes that REI is a co-op owned by its 5.5 million members, so although staying closed is certain to cost it money, it won't have to justify the move to any outraged shareholders. "We believe that being outside makes our lives better," Stritzke said in a statement. "And Black Friday is the perfect time to remind ourselves of this essential truth. We're a different kind of company—and while the rest of the world is fighting it out in the aisles, we'll be spending our day a little differently. We're choosing to opt outside, and want you to come with us." The move is "wildly counterintuitive," but perhaps not as "commercially suicidal" as it may seem, writes Micah Solomon at Forbes. Modern consumers look for "authenticity" and "attached meaning," making REI's brand more attractive when it's seen to actually stand for something, he writes. (More stores have decided to stay closed on Thanksgiving.)