How far would you be willing to travel to shop at a store large enough to house a mock Rocky mountain range (complete with working waterfall), a life-size Cessna airplane, and a 10,000-gallon aquarium filled with trout, carp, and other fish. Judging by the license plates on the vehicles I’ve seen at the Cabela’s outdoor store near my home, some people are willing to drive thousands of miles to browse through the retail store/natural history museum.
The massive complexes located around the country, which are part educational attraction, part entertainment venue and part retail giant have fast become tourist destinations in the cities that have enough space to accommodate them. The Cabela’s I live near is located just northwest of Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the Town of Richfield. The 165,000 square foot showroom is located on 60 acres and hosts travelers from as far away as Canada and California.
The same can be said for the Cabela’s location in eastern Pennsylvania where some travelers have been known to camp out at night in their Winnebagos on the fringes of the store’s parking lot just so they can be the first in line when the doors open in the morning. The newest Cabela’s opened its doors in East Hartford, Connecticut last weekend and has already hosted more than 100,000 shoppers. (It helps that the new store was built next to the University of Connecticut’s football stadium, which is filled with as many as 40,000 fans on game day.)
The East Hartford store is located about 100 miles from Boston and 120 miles from New York City. It boasts more than 185,000 square feet of retail space and stocks everything from clothing, food, camping and fishing gear, to automotive equipment, hunting equipment, pet supplies and more. But, you don’t have to spend money there to have a good time. The Cabela’s I live near (as well as the one in East Hartford) is home to a diorama with elephants, lions, zebras, hyenas and other taxidermied African animals. In addition, the store is also populated by other stuffed animals including a mechanical polar bear that reaches out to customers, a shooting range where shoppers can try out guns before purchasing them, and a wading pool where you can “test drive” fly fishing equipment before walking out the door with it.
Store managers call the retail space “travel destinations for avid outdoorsmen” and say half of Cabela’s shoppers travel 100 miles or more to experience life inside. Some come looking for camouflage clothes, meat processing machines, and ammunition, while others are there to pick up fishing rods, laser range finders and practice targets that illuminate an animal’s vital organs. Cabela’s managers say the average customer stays roughly four hours and the average store hosts visitors from about 20 different states on any given day.
Have you been to a Cabela’s?
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