Do you know people who go to a Cabela’s or Bass Pro Shops even though they don’t fish or hunt? I do. They go to “see the animals.” Guess it’s like a zoo. Well, Scheels ain’t stopping at animals.
What’s Scheels? A retailer of outdoorsy stuff based out of Fargo, ND, where I hear the ice is out for only a month a year. We don’t have Scheels out here on the eastern coast (that I’m aware of) but the “zoo” folks wish we did – because the Scheels megastore planned for Billings, MT sounds like an indoor amusement park/aquarium. Check it:
> indoor Ferris wheel (65 ft high)
> 16K-gallon saltwater aquarium where divers feed fish
> shooting gallery
> sports simulators for golf, baseball and hockey
> 24 flavors of homemade fudge and Italian gelato
What else will go on there when this thing finally opens in 2014? Oh yeah: shopping. It’ll have 2 million items in its 220,000 sq ft of retail space, which incidentally is triple the retail space of the Cabela’s store that’s already in Billings.
Are there really that many people in the Billings area? And isn’t this outdoor retail megastore thing getting a wee bit ridiculous?
More
From here:
> Scheels, with 24 stores in nine states, is in an expansion mode. Next fall, a new Scheels store will open in Sandy, Utah. In 2013, Scheels will complete a 100,000-square foot store in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Its store in Grand Forks, N.D., will be renovated, with completion scheduled for the same time the Billings store opens.
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5bites
November 3, 2011 at 1:21 pm
Great wait until Bass Pro sees this. They already have enough construction going on for buildings they’ll close in a month. Plus I’ll have to wade through that many more tourists to buy a pack of rign’ hooks.
Flip 'N' Pitch
November 4, 2011 at 11:59 pm
To me Scheels was always one of those “well, it’s not Cabelas/BPS but it’s better than nothing” type places, especially if you live in BFE, MT like I used to…thankfully. Oddly, those “markets” don’t hardly even register on Cabelas and BPS radar because there’s relatively so few people total, versus say the deer hunting population of Pennsylvania or the bass fishing population of the South, much less those with enough disposable income to drop on high end hunting and fishing gear. Scheels thinks of itself as more of a family outdoor store. When you refer to the Billings location you must remember it’s not really there solely for the buying public of Billings, MT. Consider it this way, it would be the only major outdoor retailer of it’s kind north of Colorado all the way to the Canadian border and beyond, in a corridor stretching from Spokane, WA to East Grand Forks, MN. So call it a proverbial Power Play by Scheels to stake claim to the vast (-ly unpopulated!) Northern Tier as its own to which Cabelas and BPS will most likely say “good for you!” and gladly concede.