HuntingNet.com Forums - Cabela's coming to Illinois

This is just up the road for us here at HuntingNet.Com.........

Prairie Stone park in Hoffman Estates reels in Illinois’ first store

By Ed Fanselow
Daily Herald Staff Writer
Posted Friday, December 02, 2005

Cabela’s — the nationally renowned hunting and fishing retailer famous for elaborate taxidermy displays and thousand-gallon aquariums — will build its first Illinois store in Hoffman Estates, company officials are expected to reveal today.

The much-anticipated announcement follows Cabela’s purchase late last month of a 35-acre plot in the Prairie Stone business park at Route 59 and the Northwest Tollway, where the new store will be built sometime before the fall of 2007.

The property sits between two other sites that will soon be home to the new 11,000-seat Sears Centre Arena and a 100,000-square-foot indoor-outdoor water park still waiting on village hall approval.

Combined, the three attractions could cement Hoffman Estates — a once-tiny bedroom community on the Chicago-area’s western edge — as a bona-fide tourist and entertainment destination, officials say.

“The development will bring top-notch shopping, dining and entertainment to Illinois,” Cabela’s CEO Dennis Highby said in a preliminary draft of a press statement obtained by the Daily Herald late Thursday.

“(It) will serve as a genuine tourism draw and a source of pride for years to come.”

The sprawling Cabela’s store — which will sell everything from fishing rods and canoes to $1,600 crossbows — is expected to bring the village up to $2 million a year in new sales taxes.

A portion of that take, however, will likely be refunded to the company under the terms of an anticipated $15 million to $20 million incentive agreement still being negotiated with the village, sources close to the deal say. That number was initially projected to be in the ballpark of $40 million, but such a package proved itself excessive, the sources said.

According to the company’s statement, the new store will also generate as many as 400 new full- and part-time jobs.

It will be built in Cabela’s trademark style, which evokes the feeling of the outdoors with fake mountains, massive tanks stocked with native fish and a giant diorama featuring stuffed trophy animals in re-creations of their natural habitats.

The entire spectacle is known to draw visitors from hundreds of miles away and will be a boon to local restaurants, hotels and other nearby retail centers, officials say.

“Words cannot really describe the shopping experience at a Cabela’s store,” said Gary Skoog, the village’s economic development director.

The Hoffman Estates store is part of an ambitious building boom that will add nine additional stores to Cabela’s current roster of 14.

In 2006, new stores will be built in Nebraska, Louisiana, Arizona and Richfield, Wis. — about 20 miles northwest of Milwaukee.

The following year will bring grand openings in Nevada, Colorado, New Jersey and Connecticut, in addition to Hoffman Estates.

The company’s press statement, however, made no mention of a proposed store in Hammond, Ind., where the company has purchased a shuttered 93-acre country club and has negotiated a $63 million incentive agreement with city officials, according to published reports.

Some industry analysts have speculated that the company could pick both Hammond and Hoffman Estates for Chicago-area stores. Others, though, have said that the local market can only support one, especially with the company’s biggest competitor, Bass Pro Shops, planning for their second and third area stores in Bolingbrook and Portage, Ind.

Although the new Cabela’s store will still have to be approved by the Hoffman Estates village board, local officials have been trying to woo the retailer for more than two years.

In fact, it was a letter from Village Manager Jim Norris that first put Hoffman Estates on Cabela’s radar. A follow-up letter a year later spurred a visit from Highby and other corporate honchos, and a deal was born.

“It’s gratifying,” Norris said, “to see all the hard work and cooperation that has occurred since then.”

Company officials are expected to make their initial public presentation of the project to trustees later this month or early next year.