Cabela's to grow here, elsewhere
CABELA'S Canada plans to build a new flagship store in Winnipeg to replace the small one it inherited three years ago when it acquired the S.I.R. outlet on Ellice Avenue.
Company president Carl McKay said the new store will be more than twice as big as the existing 38,000-square-foot store at 1300 Ellice Ave. And it will boast a "Conservation Mountain" display and all of the other eye-catching features shoppers find when they visit one of its U.S. stores, including its 60,000-square-foot outlet in East Grand Forks, Minn.
The only catch is its Manitoba customers are going to have to wait a couple of years to set foot in the new digs.
That's because after months of stalking its prey, the hunting, fishing, camping and outdoor-merchandise retailer has finally bagged its first expansion location outside of Winnipeg. And McKay said it also plans to build two more stores on the Prairies between now and August 2012, and those expansion projects take priority over building another store here.
"We definitely need a new store in Winnipeg. And because this is where our head office is, we obviously want our (Canadian) flagship store to be here... " he said. "But you can say it will be a couple of years before we'll have a new store here."
In order tide it over until then, the company will build a 5,000-square-foot addition onto its Ellice Avenue store to give it some much-needed extra floor space. McKay said work on that will begin next month.
The first store for Cabela's Canada outside Winnipeg is a 70,000-square-foot outlet expected to open in Edmonton in the fall next year. It will be followed by another store opening in April 2012, and a third in August that year.
McKay said Cabela's wants to have at least five stores on the Prairies, including the ones in Winnipeg and Edmonton. He wouldn't say where the other three will be located. But a good guess would be Calgary, Regina and Saskatoon.
McKay said the company's goal is to establish Canada's first coast-to-coast network of outdoor-merchandise stores. So after establishing a strong presence on the Prairies, it will be setting its sights on British Columbia and Eastern Canada.
Cabela's Canada's U.S.-based parent company -- Cabela's Inc. -- broke into the Canadian market in 2007 when it purchased the former S.I.R. Mail Order and Warehouse Sports Store on Ellice.
The company said at the time it planned to use Winnipeg as the launching pad for establishing a national chain of retail stores in Canada. And it laid the groundwork for that earlier this year when it acquired one of Winnipeg's biggest warehouses -- the 345,000-square-foot former DeFehr Furniture plant on Pandora Avenue East -- to serve as its new Canadian corporate headquarters and national distribution centre.
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The Lego store had the grand opening @ Chinook this weekend and the lines were long (a few tweets about it), but it was open last Sat. and it was busy, but not insane. 
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