I got out of Cabela's Corporate management 7 months ago because I saw the writing on the wall. It's hard to ruin a company with a single decision but I feel that going public back in 2004 will prove to have been Cabela's fatal mistake. Greed and growth led to the demise of the company - being in Cabela's management I saw firsthand extremely poor, and often short-sighted management decisions trying to chase the almighty dollar and EPS pennies. Sidney, Nebraska is going to be a ghost town but even the town has only itself to blame. It bent over backward to provide Cabela's tax-increment financing (TIF) money over the years all the while maintaining an attitude that "Cabela's will NEVER leave Sidney". I'm sure Bass Pro may leave the hourly jobs at the retail store & the distribution center but the big-dollar salaries of Corporate are out of there. I feel for those hourly folks who will now be saddled with an even larger property tax debt, hospital debt, school bond issue debt, water/sewer debt, etc. Hey, but at least Tommy Millner and the EVP team are walking away with millions right - so not everyone is a loser in the Cabela's failure to succeed!
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Cabela's going public ruined the company. They went public to chase their Walmart business model and threw up stores as fast as they could. And why wouldn't brick and mortar sales go down? The stores were not special anymore....they were everywhere. Meanwhile the corporate hounds raked all they could out of it and bled the company profit purse. It stopped being a family business that everyone loved and became a meat grinder.
When you go public you have no control over who buys your stock. Now it is Cabela's in name only and more than likely they will shut a lot of stores down in the years to come. I feel no sympathy at all for corporate....greedy garage!
I just want to reiterate that the city of Sidney should enact an income tax directed towards the executive team of Cabela's and tax them at 100% of their golden parachute. The quicker the better.
By the way, why would you put a UPS reject, a Lowe's reject, a First Data reject and a Wal-Mart reject in charge of CAB anyway? Add on top of that the loser from Remington Arms?
Cabela's went public as a way for the Cabela family to get out of the business. They tried to sell it many times at the end of the nineties and at the first of the 21st century, but couldn't get it done. Blame Dave Roehr also. He's the one that started CAB in this mammoth spiral down. Anyone remember him?
What is the water/sewer debt, anyway?!?! And how long, exactly, does every building that uses water in Sidney get it tacked on to their monthly bill? How big can the "debt" actually be, and who is keeping track of seeing that the numbers are in favor of paying down the debt and not just lining the pockets of the Sidney Crew Crooks? Made the choice to move to Sterling after spending a year in that dump and never looked back.
Maybe this explains why the grand plans for a "water park" landed Sidney instead with a shiny new small swimming hole.
You need to talk to Paige Yowell with the Omaha Herald 402-444-1414
It's all about this bro:
Hey, but at least Tommy Millner and the EVP team are walking away with millions right - so not everyone is a loser in the Cabela's failure to succeed!
You nailed it! Going public wasn't a bad idea, but at the time Cabela's had too many good ole boys in charge, making decisions they had no business making. Then Cabela's compounded the issue by chasing margin and making private label the main focus. Basically telling the customer what they should purchase, vs listening to the customer and ordering what the customer wanted to purchase. Like the original post, Cabela's was caught up chasing pennies, instead of dollars. I was a retail employee for Cabela's when they went public and worked at corporate in planning/inventory. I had many head scratching moments listening to upper management make poor decisions, time and time again!