Thinking about how we had a ski shop in my town growing up, in the 1960s highway part of town

and how before the internet that's… kind of how things worked. If you lived in the mid-county and wanted to find any kinda skiing community you did it through them. They’d know what was going on with the local parks you could reasonably drive to and all the equipment coming out because there were few enough ski shops in the parks’ “catchment area”, or the territory of their local distributor, that they would each have an employee dedicated to telling them

And things worked out (while being totally opaque to anyone outside your subculture, or even sub-sub), and people made livings as shopowners or representatives by basically liking skiing and hanging out with each other on an expense account.