photos by David Bader
When I was young, there were two catalogs that mattered during the Christmas season. The first was the Sears Wish Book, which offered up for ogling the two things any 12-year-old boy most desires: toys and women in lingerie. I kept my finger in the toy section, with its G.I. Joes and Tonka trucks and chemistry sets and whatnot, but I probably spent more time in the lingerie section – all that lovely (and by today’s standards, demurely) encased softness, the closest I was going to come to a Playboy(or an actual woman, for that matter) for years and years. My adolescent self furtively pawed through the pages in ways both pathetic and necessary.
My father, meanwhile, was also pawing through a catalog in ways both pathetic and necessary. This was the other catalog that mattered in our house, and there weren’t any demurely clad models lounging about its pages (not even in the boat section). This was the Cabela’s catalog, and when it arrived, it went straight to our family’s “library,” where important reading material was ensconced in a water-spackled pile between the toilet and sink. There were other magazines there: Fishing Facts(published in Menomonee Falls, their boat advertisements didhave bikini-clad models sprawled about their merchandise), Outdoor Life, Reader’s Digest, and any number of pulp war novels for dad – They Were Expendable, The Dirty Dozen– and bodice-rippers for mom. But if you grew up in a house with rifles and shotguns leaning in corners by the front door, and clusters of fishing rods in the truck or the basement, the one staple in your collection was the Cabela’s catalog.
My father, who loved to fish and hunt, was transformed while reading the Cabela’s catalog. He remade himself. He was no longer a traveling salesman, away from his family week after week while driving from one Wisconsin paper mill town to another, servicing his far-flung clients; he was an outdoorsman, and much like the philosophers’ stone was supposed to allow medieval alchemists to turn lead into gold, equipment – stuff – ordered from the Cabela’s catalog allowed this transformation to take place. When our father got like this, we could tell that behind his glittering eyes, he was no longer in his back-bedroom-turned-office filling out sales reports, but rather traveling to or already motoring across some up-north lake, tying a new rig onto his pole and anticipating the tug of a bass or walleye seduced (as our father was) by the lure’s allure.
And we, of course, wanted to go with him.
The contents of the Cabela’s catalog were (and still are) cocaine for the outdoor enthusiast. Whatever your heart desired, it was there: fishing rods and reels, waders, boots, flies and lures, tackle boxes, fishing line, fishing vests, guns, ammo, scopes, knives, sleeping bags, tents, camp stoves, camp chairs, birdcalls, canteens, compasses, camouflage clothing – a cornucopia of outdoor equipment you just knew you had to have, and even though you knew you were only going to possess a tiny fraction of it, it was enough to simply know all this cool stuff was out there, residing in a warehouse in Sidney, Neb., (it may as well have been Sydney, Australia) waiting for your order.
Of course, it’s one thing to covet all this stuff in a catalog. It’s entirely another to get your grubby little mitts on it. Cabela’s has made that transition in a rather startling way: They’ve opened massive “destination” retail stores (19 so far in a more than a dozen states), and announced the opening of 14 more (in 10 more states plus Canada). These destination stores are like pop-up versions of the catalog, a cross between a Disney theme park and shopping mall, and
Milwaukee now boasts one as well, situated about 30 minutes north in the town of Richfield. Visiting the store is a litmus test: You’re either going to feel like a kid in a candy store or like a James Bond martini: shaken, but not stirred.
A disclaimer:I don’t hunt. I used to, but I stopped when I actually killed something. A squirrel flopping about in its death throes can either connect you to the ancient tribal blood lust or put you off hunting entirely. For me it was the latter. I still fish, though (that fish don’t scream when you kill them makes me a hypocrite, I know, but I don’t care), and I’ve no problem with hunting when it’s done right. This past deer season, for example, found me sitting in a tree stand in one part of the woods, reading, while my brothers and their friends were hunting from tree stands in other parts of the woods. A couple of doe ambled by under my stand – the only deer seen by anyone in our party on that particular day – and for about 15 seconds I wished I’d been armed with a gun instead of an Alice Munro. The feeling passed, but if they had wandered over to my brothers and gotten shot, I’d have been happy for my brothers and excited that a little venison was going to be gracing my table later that winter. Given my ambivalence, I figure I’m the perfect person to report on the Xanadu for Wisconsin’s outdoors folk.
To truly understand the appeal of the Cabela’s store (and the catalog that is still a huge part of its business), you must understand that there are four basic genes in men: the Bang-Bang, the Vroom-Vroom, the Ka-Ching, Ka-Chingand the Va-Va-Va-Voom. Women have these genes, too, though not to the same extent. With men, these were probably programmed into our DNA when we were still hunting and gathering and lying about the-mastodon-that-got-away around the community campfire. As even a cursory glance at car or beer ads demonstrate, advertising in the years since has perhaps perfected the art of intertwining its appeals to this elemental gene structure. But well before the “Four guys in a big-ass SUV charging up a mountain at a 45-degree angle so they can go fishing and/or drink beer in a mountain stream and later take some babe in an evening dress to the theater downtown” commercials appeared, there was Cabela’s, offering in the pages of its catalogs the Circe’s call of nature and lone-wolfism, and catching and killing your own food and gosh-darn-it-we-are-all-still-pioneers-out-in-the-wilderness romance.
Like the “Zoom-Zoom” Mazda auto commercials, a Cabela’s destination retail store appeals to the little boy in all of us, the kid who says, “I want that,” because it’s big and loud and shiny and big. Did I say big twice? I did. That’s because big matters. Big matters big-time at Cabela’s.
The Cabela’s in Richfield is situated on 35.4 acres at the intersection of highways 41, 45 and 145. The building, on the south end of that triangular parcel of land, takes up more than 165,000 square feet and is merely the eighth-largest Cabela’s in the country. (The largest, outside Philadelphia in Hamburg, Pa., is a jaw-dropping 250,000 square feet.)
Cabela’s bills itself as the “World’s Foremost Outfitter,” with the tag line “Like no other retail store on earth,” and it certainly works hard living up to both those billings. The company Web site claims that “A visit to a Cabela’s store is a retail experience, a museum experience and a destination experience, all rolled into one!” I don’t know about you, but when I need to buy something, I don’t go in search of a “retail experience,” I go shopping, but part of Cabela’s particular appeal is the morphing of “shopping” into “retail experience.”
The sheer size of the place is meant not just to impress, but to overwhelm. The facade, with its beamed awning and
fieldstone-supported main pillars and timbered veranda pillars and forest-green sheet metal roofs, suggests a hunting lodge on steroids.
Inside, the store opens up into a veritable cathedral of camouflage, three stories tall, with an entire flock of stuffed Canadian geese – arranged in a “V,” of course – taking wing over your head. The interior roof is supported by two rows of fieldstone pillars, each sporting an elk head, and dominating the far wall is “Conservation Mountain,” what the Cabela’s Web site calls the store’s centerpiece, “teeming with museum-
quality wildlife taxidermy displays.” The verb “teeming,” of course, would be more appropriate if the animals were alive rather than stuffed, and it’s a peculiar use of the word “conservation,” given that they are. Still, a two-story mock mountain, complete with waterfalls and streams and chock full of mounts of various game animals (desert sheep, bighorn sheep, pronghorn sheep, javelina, musk ox) as well as cute little critters like prairie dogs and an Arctic fox, is pretty impressive. At the foot of the mountain there’s also a pond, and my kids and I and various shoppers strolling by were entertained by rainbow trout roiling the water with every handful of fish meal that our guide, Rich Janke, tossed their way.
Did I say guide? Yes, this is a store that you can get lost in, and to help you navigate it are maps and, if you call ahead, a tour guide. (You’re also waited on not by clerks or even sales associates but by “outfitters.”) Janke had given 96 tours already at the time he showed me around. We stopped at the African diorama (the elephant on display cost $120,000 to mount), the gun section (3,000 guns in stock), the Gun Library (most expensive gun on hand: $18,999, an intricately engraved over-and-under shotgun with a French-walnut stock), the wildlife museum (featuring mounts of game animals, mostly of the trophy variety, either indigenous to Wisconsin – white-tailed deer and mule deer – or formerly indigenous, such as the elk), and, of course, Conservation Mountain.
Adorning the walls above the retail space, the way football stadiums list their greatest players in rings of honor, are head mounts of other trophy game animals. Many of these are from Africa (the Cabela family got interested in African safaris once they’d become successful), each with a map of the range of the animal – in some cases pitifully tiny – had it been allowed to live. You’ve got your roan antelope, your Cape buffalo, your great kudu, your black wildebeest, your red hartebeest, your gemsbok, your impala, and your common nyala. (Is there an uncommon nyala?) They’re often mounted in pairs (the Mr. and Mrs.?). North American game animals are also represented: tule elk, Rocky Mountain elk, Roosevelt elk. I asked Janke how many mounts were in the store, and he said over 400, then noted that some stores actually had more mounts, but they were expensive to maintain, so this store was among those with fewer. It took me a minute to digest that 400 was “fewer.”
Janke gives a great tour, as does Marshall Henricks, who’s responsible for my favorite part of the store, an aquarium that rivals Lake Wisconsin at the Milwaukee County Zoo. The aquarium’s three tanks – one 32,000-gallon tank and two 6,500-gallon tanks – sport all the fish native to Wisconsin, including some sturgeon that Henricks is very proud of having raised from DNR-donated fingerlings. Most of the tanks’ inhabitants – they make you want to get out and fish yourself – were caught locally and donated by staff or area fishermen.
There’s more, of course. At Cabela’s, there’s always more. Also on the main floor are an archery range, a boat showroom, areas for auto and ATV supplies, casual outdoor clothing, stuff for your dogs, camping equipment, fishing and hunting equipment, and camouflage clothing.
Need your infant camouflaged? You can get boys’ and girls’ camouflage onesies and buntings, and camouflage pajamas in both footie and nonfootie styles. The girls’ onesies have white lace trim on the collar and across the small of the back, which sort of defeats the purpose of camouflage, but I’m guessing – hoping – that these are gag-gift items. (For big people, there are racks and racks and racks of camouflage items available in a variety of background patterns, including Mossy Oak Brush, Outfitter Winter Camo and Mossy Oak New Break-up, which comes with fake leaves attached.)
Need fishing tackle? According to Janke, the fishing department alone has 30,000 SKUs for sale. (Often pronounced “skew,” SKU is short for “stock keeping unit” in the world of retail data management.) That’s 30,000 differentitems. Having 50 identical bobbers on hand is still one SKU.
You want more? On the mezzanine level there’s a food court (wild boar sandwich or bison bratwurst, anyone?), a general store, gifts, furniture, footwear and a “Bargain Cave.” Tucked under the canopy outside are gas ranges, smokers on trailers, ATVs, campers, tents, canoes and kayaks. Also situated outside are all the fishing boats and RVs they don’t have on display in the store proper. I counted 22 boats on the lot on one of my visits, plus another dozen at least in the boat showroom, the most expensive topping $48,000.
Traveling with your horse or your hunting dogs? Not to worry. A horse corral and dog kennel are provided for your convenience while you shop. That might matter since, according to Henricks, the average Cabela’s customer, if they stay to eat, spends 3.5 hours in the store.
And there are a lot of customers. Cabela’s expects 4 million customers the first year, which works out to about 11,000 customers a day. They are also (still) the world’s largest direct marketer of outdoor equipment (their Internet sales are booming, too), mailing out 76 different catalogs a year, including specific catalogs for such things as fly-fishing, boating, archery, plus (this from their Web site) “massive 500+-page Spring and Fall Master catalogs.” They mail more than 120 million catalogs a year, and the number is not shrinking.
Numbers – and the enormity of numbers – is what Cabela’s is all about. This is about quantity, the sheer plethora of items and cascading roll of numbers that is meant to – and does – impress. If you are of a certain age, you might remember when
McDonald’s first touted the number of millions of burgers it had served, then it went to billions, and then to “billions and billions,” as though Carl Sagan were counting the number of burgers sold rather than stars in the universe. If you go on the Cabela’s tour, you get a three-page “Fun Facts Questionnaire” that gives you such facts as the number of parking spaces (1,051), the number of shrubs and perennials planted (1,178 and 10,720, respectively), the amount of paved asphalt (843,931 square feet) and paved concrete (64,616 square feet) on the site, to say nothing of the linear feet of curbing (32,436 square feet). You will also be informed about how many cubic feet of concrete was used pouring the ground floor slab, how much crushed stone is underneath that, the square footage of the carpeting and the tiling, how many gallons of paint were used, the amount of steel in the building’s shell, the amount of concrete in the walls, how many trips it took Lewis Construction to deliver all that (449), how many square feet of drywall (195,000) were used in the walls, even how many toilets (21) and urinals (six) there are. These are all facts about the store that you probably weren’t curious about until they told you, and then you say, “Wow, thatisa lot.”
And when you witness the finished product, itisimpressive. (The one exception: the grouping of spindly moose outside the front entrance. Every Cabela’s store features a sculpture out front, but Richfield’s pressed-steel moose sculptures, each of them flat as a pancake, their only dimensionality the hydrofoil of their racks and legs, makes them look as though Bullwinkle had just been run over by a steamroller.)
Here’s the thing: One part of me wanted to be appalled by this spectacle of excess. But another part was thoroughly charmed. You think about the scale of the undertaking, and perhaps what’s most impressive is that this all started from a single ad taken out in the back of a newspaper.
The Cabela’s story – as told on its Web site and given on its tour (and published in a book) – is a pure Horatio Alger, can-do, entrepreneurial, only-in-America, love-that-Mom’s-apple-pie success story. The short version: In 1961, Dick Cabela was working in a Nebraska furniture store. Dick went to Chicago for a furniture show and while there bought 20 gross (at $2.25 per gross) of fly-fishing flies that he tried reselling for a dollar a dozen by advertising in a Casper, Wyo., newspaper. He got exactly one response (interesting side note, for those thinking Cabela’s caters mostly to men: That first Cabela’s customer was a woman). Dick tried again, this time in national sporting magazines, offering five flies for the cost of shipping and handling, about 25 cents in those days. They were giving the flies away for free, but his wife Mary kept on recipe cards the names and addresses of everyone who wrote in. That was the beginning of their database. Their first “catalog” was a mimeographed sheet of other fishing equipment that Dick was buying in Chicago and bringing home to resell. The business slowly took off, with Dick’s brother Jim joining them in 1963. In 1965 they incorporated, though it wasn’t until 1968 that their first salary was taken. Over the years they went from a kitchen-table operation to operating out of the basement of the furniture store to various warehouse locations to an old John Deere building to finally, in 1998, moving into a 120,000-square-foot
corporate headquarters in Sidney, Neb. Which they promptly outgrew, adding in 2002 an addition that more than doubled the size of their headquarters. They also now offer their own Visa card (having chartered their own bank, World’s Foremost Bank, to process payments) and went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2004.
They have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, and if in the process they’ve become a corporate behemoth with an expansion strategy well spelled out in their annual reports that depends on what amounts to corporate welfare – well, myths have a way of getting sullied when millions of dollars are involved. Essentially, Cabela’s picks its store sites where there’s not already a large base of commercial businesses (though often they’re near metropolitan areas), then asks for state and local government help before they actually build. In the case of the Richfield store, Cabela’s got a sweetheart deal from both the state and Washington County, which combined to toss Cabela’s some $9.75 million in road improvements and subsidies. Recently, in Keystone Cops-like fashion, the Washington County Board voted against the subsidy it had previously voted for, then reversed that vote again (in a secret session closed to the public) after County Attorney Kim Nass informed committee members that Cabela’s would likely pursue legal action to get the money. Officially, the Washington County subsidy would purchase most of the store’s wildlife dioramas and Conservation Mountain and the aquariums, but those are included in any Cabela’s destination retail store as a tourist attraction anyway.
You can rail about the way Cabela’s has gone about its expansion, but you can’t fault them for asking in the first place. The fault, one could argue, more properly belongs to local governments, who got starry-eyed about development and jobs (400 people, most of them local, are employed at the Richfield store, though most at the “outfitter” level and only 180 are full-time), and consequently didn’t think too hard about the precedent they were setting (paying profitable businesses to do what they do anyway) or about the inherent unfairness of rewarding one company with tax dollars at the expense of others (Gander Mountain, for instance, which located its new store six miles away, and did not ask for subsidies). One wonders if Cabela’s really wouldn’t have built its store in a state that shoots half-a-million white-tailed deer annually (leading the nation), leads the nation in killing or trapping five other game animals, and is in the top five for seven other types of animals (and let’s not even get into the number of fishing licenses issued annually), but the point is moot.
Perhaps of more long-term concern is that the Richfield store, as gaudy as it is, will soon be upstaged by the approximately 185,000-square-foot store in Hammond, Ind., and the store being developed – on a 780-acre business park site – in Hoffman Estates, Ill., just outside Chicago. If one of the fears about not granting Cabela’s a subsidy was that they would build the store elsewhere, well, they are doing exactly that anyway. Once those two stores are open, it could put quite a dent in the Richfield store’s business. Janke allowed that when a second store in Minnesota opened, it hurt sales at the first one. One wonders how many of those projected 4 million visitors a year for the Richfield store are coming from the two states where a huge volume of sportsmen and sportswomen will soon be able to shop at home beforedriving through Washington County on the way to the Great North Woods.
But that’s for the future to figure out. Cabela’s is successful right now because it offers a truly amazing amount of outdoor equipment and clothing, mostly at reasonable prices (besides the Cabela’s brand, there’s a lot of Columbia and Carhartt, sturdy clothes that last forever), and because, through the wackiness of its excess, it has made its retail stores into bustling meccas for a certain kind of outdoors folk – the kind who are knocked out by spectacle. It’s all the sizzle with the steak. If you like cars, you follow NASCAR. If you like lights and gambling, you head to Vegas. And if you like hunting and fishing, you head to Cabela’s.
It’s probably no accident that most of the growth for Cabela’s has been in the Midwest. Perhaps the best thing they have going for them is they hire people who fit the store, who fit the place, who understand a person’s yearning for an outdoor life different from their everyday one. As Janke told me at the end of the tour, “We’re selling you not the things you need, but the things you dream.” Janke has the quiet, unassuming confidence of a former schoolteacher – you’d want him to teach your kids (and since this article was written, Janke has quit the company to become principal for a Lutheran school). Henricks was trained as an ichthyologist, owned an aquarium shop for 34 years and has served as a consultant to fish hatcheries. Working closely with the DNR, he oversees the store’s licensing and deer registration. He also coordinates tours and arranges many demonstrations – everything from having a woodcarver come in to having cooking seminars to bringing in the sled dogs from the Iditarod. He takes a tremendous amount of pride in how he’s set up the filters on the freshwater tanks (2,500 gallons a minute pass through 2,500 bio-ball filters, carbon filters, UV filters, ozone filters, sand filters and sterilizers), and how the water is changed weekly. In his spare time he hunts, fishes, tends some 1,300 hostas at his house and raises koi.
These are nice people. These are earnest people. They work hard, they like what they do, and they do it well. They’re cheerful, knowledgeable, courteous to their customers, and so friendly and upbeat you feel as though you’ve wandered into the last reel of a Frank Capra picture.
Of course, no one shops at Cabela’s simply because the people are nice. It’s about all the stuff you can get there. But not just about the stuff. It’s about how we feelabout these things, how these things imbue us with meaning.
A confession: One area of the Cabela’s store that I barely visited while writing this article was the fishing section. In fact, I avoided it, stayed away from its siren call. I did so, I think, for the same reason I’d first stare at and then avoid looking at my father’s fishing poles and tackle boxes this past year and a half. It was too painful. My father had been slowly dying from the complications of diabetes and had not walked in well over a year. His body was wearing out; parts of it had already quit on him, and it was quite clear that all his hunting and fishing was behind him.
Still, when I brought home a Cabela’s catalog while I was researching this article, you would not have thought this was a man missing toes, a man whose foot was about to fall off, a man whose lucidity was sometimes in question. “Ah, the Cabela’s catalog!” he said, and immediately started flipping through it. His eyes, watery of late, gleamed with excitement. You could feel the energy surging through him as he talked about the guns offered for sale (he told me which was the best one to get my son for target shooting); about hunting he’d last done 30 years ago; about fishing he’d last done a decade ago. He was no longer bed-bound, his feet elevated to relieve the pressure. He was on one of those up-north lakes again, thrilling to the chase. Such is the power and lure of Cabela’s. It transports dying men decades back in time; it offers up a gorgeous and lovely and well-outfitted future.
My father died recently, and just before he did, I took my kids fishing. We spent an afternoon hauling in panfish on Pike Lake, not far from the Cabela’s store in Richfield. It was an incredibly healing afternoon – one of those afternoons where you don’t fish so much as bait up poles and release caught fish back into the lake – and I have a feeling the next time I look at my father’s fishing poles I’ll smile. I also have a feeling it will be easier now to visit the Cabela’s fishing section, and I suspect I’ll be doing that frequently in the years to come. Cabela’s, after all, is the place to go when you want to outfit your dreams.
Novelist C.J. Hribal is an occasional contributor to Milwaukee Magazine.Write to him at letters@milwaukeemagazine.com.
