Blog Mirror: Southern Rockies Nature Blog: A Depressing Visit to the Cabela's Mothership

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

Edward Abbey

I haven't kept up on the Cabala's news, but frankly Cabela's in recent months have been a bit depressing.  So it wasn't a huge surprise when I read the Southern Rockies Nature Blog entry here:

Southern Rockies Nature Blog: A Depressing Visit to the Cabela's Mothership: Entrance to the Cabela's store in Sidney, Nebraska. I first visited Cabela's headquarters store in Sidney, Nebraska, when it was st...

My comment there:

I hadn't been aware of the news, but it doesn't surprise me one bit.

Even before the merger with Bass Pro Shop it was obvious that things weren't what they once were with Cabelas. The change really came after it started opening up mega satellite stores.  

Like you, I first went to Cabelas when it was in downtown Sidney.  It was great.  The big Interstate store, when it was the only one, wasn't bad but it never had the same feel as the downtown store, which was obviously the headquarters of a store that had principally moved to catalog sales and been hugely successful at it.

That store had a very "Nebraska" feel to it.  There were always a lot of things associated with waterfowl and the people working there, real adults, tended to be discussing recent duck hunts.  The big Interstate store was very good, but something was already drifting.

I worried when they started opening the satellites, it wasn't going to go well.  At first it seemed to, but the one in Thornton didn't quite have the right feel.  When the sale to Bass Pro Shop came, I knew it was over with then.  Bass Pro Shops, as you note, is a Southern, not a northern, thing and they are very different.

Well, my prediction is that Cabala's will collapse, another victim of the American belief that retail size is all that really counts.

I used to love Cabela's, probably the same way that some people loved the old Herter's catalog.  And it frankly had that model, it was a catalog store.  Herter's, for those who can recall it, also had a unique catalog that used to come full of outdoor gear and which also contained commentary from the owner of the store.  Herter's actually inspired the original owners of Cabela's with their business model, and as it began to come up it bought some lines, including foam decoys, from Herter's.  After Cabela's did that, in fact, Herter's slid into bankruptcy, ceasing to exist in 1981.

By that time, Cabela's was very much in the ascendancy. . .using the same model.  You'd get a catalog a couple of times a  year, but frankly the only one you really paid much attention to was the fall catalog, and maybe the winter catalog.  You could tell that these guys were out of small-town Nebraska.  The hunting stuff was waterfowl centric and good.

The Sidney store itself was a bit of a charming mess.  It was tiny, weirdly organized, and had the great "bargain cave" that was packed with great stuff wall to wall that somebody had returned.  I still have a pair of Chippewa packers boots that somebody had returned, something I could not have afforded otherwise, that I picked up there probably in 1989 or so, the first time I went there.

The people who worked there, moreover, were really knowledgeable.  Men from the town who were hunters themselves.  You had the impression that this was a part-time job that gave them extra money while they were doing something else. . . maybe working on the farm or something.

Then they moved to the highway.  

Lots of people hve fond memories of the huge headquarters out on the Interstate, but it was never as good as the downtown store. This doesn't mean it was bad, but it wasn't as good.

Well, the United States being what it is, a nation that's completely failed to grasp that Capitalism and Free Marketism are not the same thing, it was probably inevitable that the success of the headquarters interstate store meant that identical stores started popping up elsewhere.  The first one I was ever in was in Rapid City, and indeed I found something on sale there that I bought, so I shouldn't complain. That store and the one in Billings, weren't bad.  One then sprung up in Thornton Colorado, and frankly it's never been more than okay at best.  I still stop in there, but it's been uniformly disappointing in recent years.

In 2017 Bass Pro Shop came along and swallowed up Cabela's.

That was part of the capitalist anti-free market monopolistic impulse that inevitable as well. Bass Pro Shop was and is a big outfit.  Focused on southern bass fishing, it had built itself up into a huge retail chain.  At some point some of its catalogs wound up in my mailbox but unlike the Cabela's catalog, they usually ended up in the trash pretty soon after that.  I don't live in the South and while I fish, I don't do that kind of fishing.  When the merger, or buyout (more accurate), came, I worried that it would mean the end of Cabela's.

And it more or less has.

The Bass Pro Shop conglomerate owns Sportsman's Warehouse as well, and I can't say that I've seen a change there, as Sportsman's was never doing that well here, and it may have actually improved somewhat, but you can see the problem here.

And it doesn't have to be that way.

All giant retailers can and do exist as they have a corporate structure, and corporations are creatures of the government.

Eh?  What about free market and competition, and all that jazz?

Nope, they're creatures of the government.

It as the British who invented them, and more specifically, they came about due to British colonialism.  It simply wasn't possible to raise large amounts of capital, i.e, cash, from people who would risk it all, like it would if you were investing in a partnership, for giant colonial enterprises.

Here perhaps an example would best illustrate the situation.

If I'm looking to put together a bunch of cash to invest in a colonial enterprise in East India, and its going to take a lot of it, I'm going to have to get a lot of it from a lot of people. But most of those people are going to stay safe and warm in Old Blighty  So, when I go to Lord Smithers, or whomever, and as for £10,000 Sterling, and he asks how safe his investment is, if I’m honest I'm going to have to tell him about the risks, and part of that risks is that some competing enterprise or person might file suit against all the partners, if that's what we are, including Lord Smithers.  At that point, he'll probably decide to keep his silver and go back to forcing Scottish peasants off the land so he can raise sheep instead.

But, if I get Parliament to create a new legal creature, the corporation, I can tell Lord Smithers that all he's risking is his personal cash.  No individual liability at all. That's a much better deal.

Indeed, that will not only appeal to Lord Smithers, who has big amounts of spare cash, but also to the new middle class.  Lots of Mr. Jones, and Mr. Smiths, who don't have £10,000 Sterling, but who might have £10 or £20.

You get the point.

But there was a dark side to that which nobody anticipated at the time.  Sure, corporations allowed for the build up of lots of cash in a new economic system, capitalism, but nobody ever thought that it would be used for anything other than gigantic investment high-risk entities.  Sure, the East India Company (really the first true corporation) or the Hudson's Bay Company, but not retailers.  Indeed, early on corporations were restricted in their existence and took specific legislative acts in order to exist.  The first free corporations act, i.e., a bill allowing for parties meeting certain requirements simply to incorporate on their own, in the US first came about in 1811.  That New York act was restricted to manufacturing.  The first general incorporation act in the US didn't come about until 1896.

1896.

So when you hear all the stuff from confused free marketers about how this has always been, and how corporations should be free of government influences. . . well, they're creatures of government influence and haven't been around in the moder form all that long.

They've certain spread and like all businesses, they have a monopolistic instinct.  People may tell you that they're all hip and cool in competition, but truth be known, every business would prefer to be a monopoly. And that's why they buy each other. Medium-sized retailers buy out small ones, big ones buy out large ones, the goal is to be the only one.

The irony is that as this occurs, service doesn't really improve.  The larger things become, the less it knows about the local.

Indeed, Cabela's showed its Nebraska origin throughout its independent existence, which was okay if you were from a neighboring state.  And it somewhat got the neighboring states too, as its winter catalog and summer catalog showed. As noted, Bass Pro Shop never did.  Sportsman's Warehouse, even though it was founded in Utah, obviously didn't as it would stock stuff in its stores that you'd never use here.

On top of it, big v. small ultimately becomes a price v. quality war, which was probably part of Herter's problem.  Herter's stuff was good.  But at some point, the real attraction to big is low price to an extent.  This is only partially true of a niche store, like Cabela's, as part of it is also having stuff you can't find elsewhere.  Indeed, L. L. Bean, which has just started to go down the fatal extra retail outlet road, really had that down for eons.

The ultimate example of this is of course Walmart, whose low low prices have depressed the quality of retail goods in the US.  Things really aren't as good as they used to be in some categories, quality wise, because of Walmart, which is so aggressive in its desire to have the lowest prices in the universe that it's caused manufacturers of some durable goods to use cheaper components. Consumers don't see this.

All of this has done a bunch of different things to the American retail scene.  On one hand, it had really served to drive prices down.  It's also served to drive manufacturing overseas, although there's more to it than that, and its served to drive prices down as well.  And its drive local businesses out of existence.  Americans who praise this particular system in its current form, and there are many, probably more than who critique it, fail to note that at some point low low prices by a giant retailer mean that everyone has low low wages and can't afford to buy crap.  And indeed, there's also the problematic economic problem of the tendency of profits to decline, which has been theorized upon by every economist from Adam Smith on, but which capitalism ultimately can experience for some of the reasons we're noting, although there are many other factors and the rule isn't an iron clad one itself.

Anyhow, all of that gets back to this.

Chances are that a local sporting goods store, or even a small chain, may better serve your needs than a large one.  I've seen that a lot of times with sporting goods stores and chains, and I start to worry when one is so successful it begins to expand. I really worry when it starts to buy out its competition.

Probably the only real saving grace of all of this is that it tends to function much like the analogy noted above, if left untreated.  Things get so big, they cease to function efficiently, as they can't, and die.

That may be beginning to happen to the Bass Pro Gargantuan.  I still have my Cabela's card for some reason, but it does't have the attraction it once did.  And now, more often than not, I just drive by the one in Thorton or Billings and don't stop.  And my catalog isn't met with anticipation the way it once was, and it head for the round file pretty quickly.

I'll bet I'm not the only one.