Politics & Power Quote by Mike May

Mike May’s line is the kind of blunt market diagnosis that tries to sound like social commentary, and that’s exactly why it lands. On its face, it’s an industry lament: fewer people moving means fewer sneakers, fewer gloves, fewer reasons to replace the treadmill belt. But the subtext is sharper: the consumer isn’t just fickle, the consumer is failing. Sedentary becomes a moral category, not merely a behavioral one, and that shift conveniently relocates blame away from product strategy, pricing, or retail disruption and onto the body of the nation.

It’s also a neat inversion of how Americans usually talk about sport. We’re saturated with sports media, athleisure, and performance branding, yet May implies the underlying activity has thinned out. The comment quietly separates the spectacle from the practice: watching, scrolling, and buying the identity of fitness isn’t the same as playing pickup basketball or jogging three times a week. If anything, the rise of “sport” as content can coexist with a population that barely breaks a sweat.

Context matters here. A businessman is speaking from the pressure point where public health trends meet quarterly results. “Too sedentary” reads like a critique of culture (screens, desk jobs, car dependence), but it’s also a bid to make the industry’s slump feel inevitable, even virtuous to complain about. If the problem is national inertia, no single company has to admit its gear has become a luxury, a fashion item, or simply less necessary when exercise migrates from fields to subscriptions and apps.