I worked for Zumiez for a few years, and can assure it is a terrible company to give your money to.
I originally worked for a small chain of shops called Fast Forward, based in Texas and maybe ~15 stores. They had shops in malls, but they also sponsored locals at each location, which included a free deck and wheels per month, plus a great discount on everything else. They also brought in demos all the time and gave back to their communities. So even though they were technically a "mall shop" they did it right.
Zumiez bought out Fast Forward in 2004-ish. I had been a salaried co-manager at Fast Forward for a few years so I opted to stay when it got bought out, got the same pay and all that stuff. It was great for a bit, until they eventually fully unleashed their horrible business practices on us.
The worst part is the sales tactics. Their slogan or whatever you want to call it was literally "SELL AS MUCH AS YOU CAN TO AS MANY PEOPLE AS YOU CAN." They had pages upon pages of acronyms and clever sayings to remember to help you sell stuff, like "4 over the door" which meant anytime someone went in the dressing room, you were supposed to run around the store and grab 4 more items you thought they might like and throw them over the dressing room door to pressure them into buying more.
They have sales charts where you literally had to write down how much you sold every single hour and if you didn't meet the goal you would coached on what you were doing wrong. They wanted you to follow people around and hound them and show them stuff constantly as well.
They also had commission-based sales on purchases over $100. It's like 2% for $100-200, 3% for 200-300, and on, up to a 7% maximum I think.
Now I know how retail sales works and a lot of those things are just smart techniques to ensure your company is making money. And that's great. And if that's what you're all about, then have at it.
But every time you shop there you are giving your money to a company that only cares about selling as much as possible to everyone. And each of those sales is less money for the dude that actually gives a shit and started up a local skateshop to try and give back to the community. Yes, local shop dude wants to make a bunch of money too, but generally they do a much better job of fostering relationships with the local skaters and also try to have demos and contests and whatever. And since they're not tied down by stupid fucking corporate policies, they're also more likely to work with people on stuff and do little things like special order and whatnot. Not to mention you can usually also hang out in your local shop and watch skate videos without some fucking dude-bro employees bugging you constantly.
I could prob go on and on but I just realized this is stupid as fuck but I'm also not gonna delete everything I typed.
Bottom line is, Zumiez is not "eh whatever they have good sale items sometimes." They are helping to kill your local skateshops, and that's not a good thing.