Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Cabelas on Tucker Tonight

They see the writing on the wall. Brick and mortar stores across the nation are slowly dying. They are listed as "dead stocks" for investors and most of them , with a few exceptions like Walmart, are struggling. Mergers are a symptom of the new retail climate. Mainstays like J C Penney's are just hanging on by their fingernails compared to 30 years ago..

According to the video, if you watched it, Cabelas was making 2B a year on 4B in sales. That's far from fading or failing. They were forced into selling because they didn't have the nads to tell Singer to fug off.

Title of the story:
"The death of Sidney, Nebraska: How a hedge fund destroyed 'a good American town'"

Go back to the mid 80's. Change town name to Scotia California. Company named Palco, bought out by Maxxam Holding Company.



Probably happens more frequently than we hear about.

Geno

Furthermore, that Singer guy doesn't seem to know he's supposed to be a Bolshevik.

Haven't bought anything there in a couple of years. Never seem to have the powder, bullets, primers that I'm looking for. Prices seem to be a little high, too.

Firearms have locks on the triggers and low inventory, usually. Makes one wonder if the place is going out of business...soon.

Sometimes you talk with someone that is knowledgeable, but that is exceptional.

Background procedure when buying firearms seems to be the slowest.

Oh, he knows.

He's just a Capitalist Bolshevik.

Geno

I rarely buy any thing from pro bass. To me it's like Big Five on steroids. I miss Cabelas.

Neither are or were worth the effort to drive to... and Cabela's is in reasonable walking distance from my house. Cabela's had some fantastic sales a few times and I will miss that. Actually they just had M&P Shields in 40S&W for $180 and I almost bought one because it was a good deal...

Remember it and the situation well, Scotia is just 20 minutes down the road.

I was a satisfied Cabela’s customer starting in ‘84, shopping by catalog and phone. I remember visiting Sydney 20yrs later, and it was incredible. I think I was there for six hours.

The BPS buyout has ruined the company and other than sitting on a large pile of CC points, I have no interest in shopping there anymore. I didn’t realize there was a greedy POS to blame. I thought it was just kids or grandkids that inherited and cashed out.

So there's the Bass Pro part in all of this. One promising busisness model was to let Cabella's run itself as an upscale alternative it Bass Pro. Cover the entire market, no question that Cabella's had better product lines and better service. and was profitable. But nooo, the geniuses had to tear Cabellas down to Bass Pro Levels. Wait for the name change when customers realize the name Cabella's means nothing.

This same corporate raider operations were going on in the 1970s, Romney was said to have been involved. Now corporate takovers can be done right and that's the way Romney was supposed to have done it. But generally I hate this [bleep], can you tell?

Bass Pro having such a large percentage of the big box store retail market share is not beneficial for the hunting industry as a whole. It's similar to years ago when Walmart
discontinued the sale of guns in about half of their stores which forced the sale of Remington as Remington had to have the Walmart gun sales volume to survive.

When Walmart made the announcement of not selling guns in half their stores, I said there goes Remington. A new investment group bought Remington and we all know what happened to the gun product "Quality' from the sale to present.

Correct. Dick and Jim Cabela took it public in 04 to get money to expand. At that point it's no longer "your business" it belongs to you and your investors and the parts are not equal.

In 2007 they bought S.I.R. Warehouse in Canada and did the same thing that Bass Pro is being accused of. Kept the store and fired the mgt there. They fought and lost the retail battle to Bass Pro and ended up getting bought. Nothing personal. It's business.

I miss the original family owned Cabela's too. I've been shopping with them for 40+ years but this is the way things go. We're not particularly better off for it but there is little to do to stop it once a company decides to go public.

I used to drive up to that one to kill time on a regular basis. It's dog friendly, so it was a decent way to kill half of a bad weather day and get Shadow out of the house. I'd find something to buy almost every time. I won't make that trip anymore. Unless I am passing by it for some reason or another I won't stop. Most of the time I pass by it, I don't bother. The gun library can still have some interesting stuff.

Baine Capital. There is no defense of these money changers.

Dunno, that's after I studied this sort of thing. But there are case studies where hostile takeovers have saved mismanaged companies, mismanaged to the point of complete failure.

Yep. Businesses come and go.

I see Cabela's as a complete failure. The Cabela's that I knew and loved no longer exists. Used to enjoy making an afternoon outing to their store in Delaware; now it's not worth the bridge toll. I bought an Alaskan Guide tent ($$$), in part because of Cabela's lifetime warranty. Now the warranty is Charmin.

While agree with general view of the old Cabelas offering more quality than BPS, I think the real killer for Cabelas was the move to widespread brick and mortar stores at a time when the whole model was under going decline. The expansion cost a lot and weakened them when becoming a better internet retailer might have been a better strategy.