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Retail outlet for surfing equipment and related products, as well as a time-tested cultural stronghold. "Surf shops," journalist Craig Stecyk wrote in 1996, "function as the sport's information centers, supply depots, halfway houses, classrooms, libraries, churches, banks and museums."

California surfboard shaper Dale Velzy is sometimes credited as the inventor of the surf shop, opening his first Velzy Surfboards outlet in 1950 in Manhattan Beach, California, not long after the city closed the boardmaking operation he ran from beneath the municipal pier. Surfboards at the time were generally built-in garages or backyards, and many of the sport's first shops—including those founded by Hobie Alter, Greg Noll, Ron DiMenna, and Bing Copeland—opened as a result of aggravated parents shutting down their children's messy and chemical-smelling in-house operations.

Surf shops began as tiny single-item outlets, where surfboards were shaped and glassed and sold in the same room. "There were sawhorses," surf journalist Patrick McNulty recalled, "and bare electric lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling." As the sport grew, board manufacturing was separated from the retail showroom, first to an adjacent room, then off-premises altogether.

Jack O'Neill, who would later make his name as a wetsuit magnate, opened what he called the Surf Shop in San Francisco in 1952; because O'Neill sold wetsuits as well as surfboards, it's been argued that this was the first true surf shop.

The original Hobie Surfboards in Dana Point, a factory-retail store that opened in 1953, was the first custom-designed and built surf shop—and was in fact so far advanced compared to Velzy's and O'Neill's rudimentary operations that it has also been called the original surf shop.

As the fledgling surf industry expanded, so too did the shop's inventory list: by 1961, T-shirts, trunks, magazines, and wetsuits were sold alongside boards (new and used) and boardmaking supplies. The number of shops grew steadily as well; 41 outlets are listed in a directory of Southern California surf shops published in the 1963 Petersen's Surfing Yearbook; dozens more were located in Central and Northern California, the American eastern seaboard, Hawaii, Australia, and New Zealand. First-generation shops were also opened in England, France, and South Africa.

From the beginning, patrons have viewed the surf shop as something much grander than a specialty retail store. Young surfers in particular were awestruck by the new boards and the bawdy and-or adventurous stories told by older customers; the shop clerk, furthermore, often had a local—or national or even international—reputation as a hot wave-rider. Surf posters and photos covered the shop walls; trophies lined the shelves; stickers were plastered on windows and countertops.

Not surprisingly, the surf shop has been romanticized in film (

, for example) and print. "Like trading outposts along a watery frontier," writer Sam George rhapsodized in 1989 . . .

. . . these shops were more than just retail outlets, they were havens for those adventurous men and women who lived in that lonely wilderness of sea and shore. These were places to come in from the cold and the wet, to stock up on essentials, pass the time with stories and tall tales. Most importantly, the shop was a place to worship those shiny new boards that stood [like] tall, righteous apostles, wrapped in sweet-smelling coats fiberglass mail, eager to embark on their great Crusade.

The surf shop continued to evolve. By the early '90s, surf videos played constantly on a wall-mounted TV. Until the late '70s, most surf shops carried only the house brand of surfboard, but it proved wiser from a retail point of view to carry an array of brands—despite the fact that boards have long been the surf retailing industry's least-profitable item. Most shops additionally stocked several brands of wetsuits and surfwear, surf leashes, wax, and an array of surf magazines and videos. Once proudly unkept, like surfers themselves, clean and orderly surf shop began turning up in suburban malls and shopping centers in the mid-'80s, proportionally reducing the number of "core" (short for "hardcore") operations.

Meanwhile, the concept of the all-service surf shop was greatly expanded. By the 1990s, the 52,000-square-foot Ron Jon's Surf Shop in Cocoa Beach, Florida, was open 24 hours a day, and stocked equipment for snowboarding, skateboarding, windsurfing, rollerblading, skimboarding, bodyboarding, wakeboarding, diving, jetskiing, waterskiing, bicycling, camping, and volleyball, along with near-endless racks of beachwear and wetsuits.

The '90s and early '00s also saw the development of specialty surf shops for women and longboarders, while online-only shops began pulling business away from brick-and-mortar shops.

In 2003, there were an estimated 2,000 surf shops worldwide, in places as diverse as the Great Lakes, Italy, Thailand, Nicaragua, Senegal, Israel, and Nova Scotia. America at that point was believed to be home to about 700 shops selling 50 or more boards a year; half were located in California. Some American shop owners were up in arms as Costco began selling a mass-produced Taiwanese-made board called the Realm for $244.99—about $100 less than the average shop board.

Traditionally, surf shops have sponsored top local riders and underwritten local surf competitions. Some offer board repair services and surf lessons.

Surf shops have been featured in novels (Kem Nunn's 1984 book 

), literary magazines (William Finnegan's 1992 New Yorker feature, 

), and television (1993's short-lived sitcom 

surfboard shop

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