WASHINGTON — Yeti coolers are the hottest coolers around. They are also wildly expensive, between $250 and $1,300, depending on the size. So a discount on a Yeti, like the company offered to the NRA and other organizations, is no small thing.
Still, the price of the coolers didn't stop some Yeti owners, including one in South Carolina's Pee Dee region, from blowing them up in ritual anger after the National Rifle Association claimed that Yeti was terminating the discount as part of an NRA boycott.
On Monday afternoon, for example, Bryan Atkinson unloaded a Yeti cooler from the bed of a truck parked on a dirt road in the middle of a field north of Hartsville. Inside the cooler he placed ammonium nitrate and aluminum powder, packaged in a cardboard box sealed with duct tape.
"This Yeti," he said, "ain't ready."
His friends took the cooler out to the middle of the muddy field and set it down. Atkinson got on one knee and lifted his AR-15 to eye level. Then, with one shot, he blew the Yeti cooler to pieces.
"If Yeti can't stand behind the NRA, I ain't standing behind Yeti no more," Atkinson told the camera during a Facebook Live video, which has been shared more than 2,300 times.
The stunt followed a letter to NRA members sent by the NRA Institute for Legislative Action announcing that Yeti had severed ties with the NRA Foundation, following the lead of other companies in the wake of the Feb. 14 Parkland, Fla., shooting massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
The letter, sent by former NRA president and current lobbyist Marion P. Hammer, said the company "declined to do business with The NRA Foundation" without prior notice and "refused to say why."
"They will only say
