The Ozark Trail XXL Director chair is a good, if somewhat basic director’s style camp chair, offered by a company with a solid reputation in the market. While it does have a few shortcomings, these are generally easy to fix and easy to overlook. If you want something a bit easier to access, you could always drill a small hole in one corner of the tray table and affix the D-Ring there, but many people will balk at the idea of defacing their chair. Either way, it’s easy to add a bit of storage if you want or need it.
There’s a cupholder on the right arm and a built-in cooler on the left that can hold a six-pack of drinks (or more, if you dare). There’s even a bottle opener attached to the inside of the cooler to cover all the bases for chillin’ and grillin’ outside. On the back is an elastic slot and Velcro bands to secure an overhead umbrella, and underneath the seat is a strap that collapses the chair for easy transport. These Ozark Trail camp chairs are perfect to take with you to kid’s sports games, camping trips, or to simply have them around so you can lounge in your backyard. The Everywhere Chair keeps your bottom about 4 inches off the ground.
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We think the REI chair functions better and will last much longer than the similar chair from Walmart. But the price difference is significant—and after six months of near-constant outdoor use, the Walmart chair was still in decent shape. If you are looking for an ultracheap choice, the Walmart chair is one. You can stow this featherlight, compressible chair in a backpack or even a work bag. Aside from the impressive amount of weight the chair can support, the thing we like best about the numbers above is the width of the seat.
The canopy quickly and easily transforms into a carrying case—just wrap it around the chair and snap it closed with two plastic buckles, and you can carry the whole thing on your back like an oblong backpack. We brought this chair to ozark trail canopy a dense Los Angeles neighborhood to watch Fourth of July fireworks. But carrying the Renetto was comfortable and unobtrusive. We got some admiring nods en route to the celebration—and we had one of the more comfy seats at the show.
At just 21 ounces, the Alite Monarch was the lightest of the three chairs we tested in this category, as well as the most compact, but its two-legged design required your own legs to serve as the third leg of the stool. But after half a dozen excursions, we found—as we had with the Renetto Original Canopy Chair—that having a chair you can easily carry without a bag is preferable. In real-world conditions, you’re often packing up fast to try to get ahead of crowds or traffic. So you can easily misplace a carry sack on a dark night in a crowded field, especially if you’re in a large group or have a lot of stuff. At a fireworks show and at the beach, we appreciated a chair that was ready to go without even 30 seconds of hassle.
The one thing this chair doesn’t have, however, is storage. Fortunately, this is also easy to remedy via a bit of DIY engineering. Simply buy a mesh bag for storage and attach a D-Ring to it, then clamp it onto one of the support struts on the chair. Simply put, it can be notoriously difficult to find furniture that’s big and robust enough to support you properly.
Each comes with a convenient carrying bag that you can sling over your shoulder. Made from an easy-to-clean polyester fabric and metal frame. Our not-too-discriminating underage testers liked all the kids’ chairs, though over time we found several reasons to declare the REI Camp Chair the best of the bunch. The REI chair’s polyester seat material feels both more forgiving and more durable than the thinner material on the Ozark Trail Kids’ Folding Camp Chair from Walmart. The box-shaped cupholder is a little roomier than the round cupholders on the Coleman and the L.L.Bean Base Camp chairs—better for stubby water bottles or mugs of hot chocolate around the campfire.