Where you shop

At a regional development meeting the guest speaker started his presentation with the question -what were the three most visited locations in south eastern Pennsylvania? It was no great surprise that number one was the Liberty Bell / Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Number two was the Amish Country of Lancaster County and number three was the Cabela's sporting goods store just outside of Hamburg (that was a surprise).

Hamburg is a typical small Pennsylvanian city. It's look is dominated by lots red brick and stone work with plenty of architectural examples from the 1880's - 1920's. From a distance Hamburg looks like it was built by the most dedicated model railroad enthusiast. If you were trying to find it on a map, it's at the intersection of highways 61 and 78 about 15 miles (25 km) due north of Reading.

Cabela's is no ordinary sporting goods store. It's 250,000 square feet of shopping space (23,000 sq. meters).

In the next 30 years polar bears might be extinct in the wild but there are a mounted pair of them on display at Cabela's. Through out the store there are several major dioramas that would be the envy of any natural history museum as well as a huge fresh water aquarium stocked with game fish in a recreation of a perfectly natural setting.   

Below is a a sales display using an airplane that hangs from the ceiling. That is not a model of an airplane but actually a real airplane. It gives an idea of how big this one store is.

Photos from under the airplane looking down on the main floor.





Cabela's is a huge corporation as big as it stores. It has about fifteen thousand employees, a revenue of three billion dollars and about three dozen other retail locations across North America backed up with their worldwide catalogue business.

Cabela's pays no real estate taxes. They have a long tern tax abatement agreement. These days many of your big box stores negotiate this first before they build. Some call it corporate welfare others say it's an economic incentive. One thing that's troubling is how no one really keeps track of the economic growth afterwards, so there's no way to tell if the incentives expanded the economic pie or just shifted money from one group to another. A second troubling trend is how the incentives have escalated, where new retailers are allowed to keep the money collected as state sales tax or even get direct cash subsidies from state and local governments.

In the last few years, surrounding Cabela's, a Lowes and Wal Mart have been built. About a dozen fast food restaurants  three car dealerships and hotel also been constructed on what was forest and farmland. From what I understand most these retailers also get some kind of economic intensive to do what you think any business would naturally do on it's own.

So instead of paying for new schools, repairing bridges or keeping up with the core functions of government, tax money is going to big box retailers to put the local Mom & Pop stores out of business. Small businesses are forced to pay taxes that their competitors are exempt from. These days more people drive past Hamburg than through it. It's becoming the story of so many small towns in America where opportunity vanishes for the individual and where money doesn't really circulate in a community but is instead strip mined out and sent off to a distant group of stockholders. Think about it as you shop this holiday season.