Hey WesternersFollow

You mean like Cabelas? Yes, they're decent size and definitely an anchor store. No idea on square footage though.

Edited, Nov 28th 2011 2:12pm by BrownDuck

If you're really curious, I can drive by the one in Salem OR on the way home and take a look at it.

Google street view?

someone planning an investment opportunity?

REI, Western Mountain Sports, Cabellas, Eagle Outfitters, LLBeans are all competitors.

Are you looking at opening a franchise Up There somewhere?

They tend to vary in focus and size. Most of the fishing ones are smaller, usually with a camping section. REI is a large one over here that is more geared towards hiking, rock climbing, general outdoorsy, but has very little hunting or archery equipment. Cabellas is huge, its about the size of a damned shopping mall. But they have a decent selection of archery gear, lots of camping stuff, and many, many guns. We have a few others around here that tend to be about the size of a home improvement warehouse store like lowes or home depot, but they keep changing ownership. They put one in next to other work in orchards that had a really nice selection of archery scopes before they went out of buisiness. I picked up a few very nice Sure loc scopes for about 1/16th retail.

Now I want to go shooting with my bow dang it.

***** Sporting Goods was another big box store we had/have out here. I used to fill my air bottle at one near my home, get paint balls and such. They went out of business, or maybe they moved - but I was only one or two stamps from filling up my frequent-filler card. I think ***** is still a viable company though - not sure.

Those stores in general. I think wholesale sports actually owns what was previously sportsmans warehouse, which was something else before that. The building has been there for 2 years now, brand new, and has changed hands 3 times. It's in a pretty good location too all things considered. We had another fairly major chain, go bankrupt entirely after 20 years in the area this year. Partially its been the crapppy economy. For some reason there is an inherent lag of about 3 or 4 months in terms of economic forces. washington and oregon entered the recession about 4 months later than the rest of the country, but when we did hit, we hit pretty hard by comparison, and stayed in it longer than other areas. That, coupled with higher equipment costs for outdoor activities here (its cold and rainy all the time) compared to warmer areas of the country, and higher costs for hunting and fishing licenses compared to other areas, and discretionary spending on outdoor activities went down dramatically. That should be going back up again now, and historically has been fairly high compared to other areas of the country. but alot of the hunting demographic in particular has been hit hardest by the economy problems at the moment. Us having the third highest gas prices in the country for most of the year didn't help matters either, since people were not going anywhere like they normally would have.

There are also quite a few stores dedicated to skiing. I don't ski much, so they slipped my mind, but with so many high mountains all around here, there is a big ski population. those were hurting this year though too, because of the gas price thing.

Edited, Nov 30th 2011 7:17am by Kaolian

They have pretty sizable competition from the REI co-op chain, in the US anyway, I'm not sure of their coverage in Canada. Are you looking to acquire a single store, several or the enterprise? This is relevant, because quite a lot of the acquisitional growth is acquired via the online/catalog direct sales channels, and I'm not sure of how they flow-through to stores.

Just the one. We're not really interested in buying it, we want it to anchor a development.