The holiday shopping calendar has stretched well past its traditional boundaries, and outdoor retailer REI is the latest to prove it. The company's annual Holiday Sale is now underway and runs through November 23rd, offering markdowns across categories that range from GPS smartwatches to camping equipment — weeks before the actual holiday rush begins.
The sale has drawn coverage from an unusually wide spread of outlets, each slicing the same promotion along different lines. The Verge focused on wearables and fitness technology; MSN published separate guides for climbers and hikers; Outside assembled a list of expert-picked deals. Taken together, the coverage offers a useful case study in how a single retail event gets refracted through different audiences — and where those accounts agree.
The Headline Discount: Garmin's Forerunner 570
For gadget-focused readers, the standout is Garmin's Forerunner 570, a running watch that The Verge describes as packing a bright OLED display, skin temperature sensors, and a built-in speaker and microphone for taking calls. It also offers multiband GPS, personalized training plans, and up to 11 days of battery life.
The watch is listed at $449.99, down from $549.99, with the same price available at both Amazon and Best Buy. That parity matters: The Verge explicitly notes it tracked competing retailers to confirm readers weren't overpaying, a detail that reflects the increasing sophistication of deal coverage, where the discount itself is no longer the story — the comparison is.
Also receiving a sizable discount is the Garmin InReach Mini 3, a satellite communicator aimed at backcountry users who travel beyond cellular range. It is the clearest point of overlap between the gadget-focused and outdoor-focused coverage, sitting at the intersection of consumer electronics and safety equipment.
"To save you time, we've sifted through the deluge of discounts to find an assortment of deals we recommend here at The Verge," the publication wrote, adding that it noted "when competing retailers are offering lower prices on the same items, so you can be sure you're getting the best deal possible."
Climbing and Hiking: The Category View
Where The Verge organized its coverage around product types, MSN's two guides organized around activities. One collected the five best deals for climbers; another assembled ten for hikers. The framing is meaningfully different: instead of asking what a device does, these guides ask what a reader is planning to do with it — a distinction that matters in a market where a single piece of gear can serve wildly different users.
Outside's contribution, nine expert-picked deals, leans on editorial judgment rather than aggregation. That approach carries its own weight in outdoor retail, where the gap between a genuine markdown and a cosmetic one is often invisible without knowing a product's typical street price. Readers relying on a percentage-off badge alone can easily be misled.
The Membership Multiplier
Running alongside the item-level discounts is a stackable promotion for REI members: promo code HOLIDAY2026 unlocks 20 percent off one full-price item, plus an additional 20 percent on one REI Outlet item. For loyal customers, that combination can outstrip the value of any single doorbuster, particularly on higher-priced gear that rarely gets discounted.
- Sale window: Through November 23rd
- Member code: HOLIDAY2026 — 20% off one full-price item
- Outlet bonus: An additional 20% off one REI Outlet item
- Lead electronics: Garmin Forerunner 570 at $449.99 (from $549.99); InReach Mini 3 discounted
Why the Season Starts So Early
The timing is not incidental. Black Friday has become, in The Verge's words, "a shopping season of its own, with retailers once again offering discounts well ahead of the actual shopping holiday." Early promotions serve several purposes at once: they capture consumers before competitors do, they smooth out logistics by spreading order volume across weeks rather than days, and they generate the kind of editorial coverage these four outlets have just produced — effectively free advertising built on the premise that the deals are worth sifting through.
For REI, a member-owned cooperative, the strategy carries an added dimension. Its discount structure rewards membership, and promotions that stack a general code with an outlet bonus convert casual shoppers into members rather than merely moving inventory.
The Caveats Worth Heeding
The coverage also implicitly warns against treating any single roundup as definitive. Category guides reflect their authors' priorities: a runner's ideal watch may be a poor choice for a climber, and a hiker's needs differ from a camper's. Price comparisons fluctuate during sale periods, and an item cheaper at one retailer on Monday may be cheaper elsewhere by Friday.
What the four accounts share is a method — filter the noise, verify the price, recommend selectively — and a conclusion that the most valuable discounts this year cluster around wearable and satellite technology on one end and activity-specific gear on the other. For shoppers with a trip already on the calendar, the practical advice embedded across all four is essentially identical: buy the gear you'll actually use, confirm the price against a competitor, and use the membership code on the one item that never goes on sale.
