Cabela's touted as a tourist destination

EAST HARTFORD, Conn. — Leslie Coppola and Mark Guimond detoured several years ago while heading home from a vacation in Virginia to visit a Cabela's outdoors store in eastern Pennsylvania. They camped out in their Winnebago at night and shopped during the day.

Coppola and Guimond can now take holidays a little closer to their New Britain, Conn., home. Cabela's opened a store on Oct. 19 in East Hartford, and, as with its other 22 stores, the new location is being touted as a tourist destination.

"We took a couple of vacation days to be here," Coppola said outside the store the day before the opening. "It's incredible. It's absolutely incredible."

Cabela's has stores primarily in the South, West and Midwest. The Connecticut location — about 100 miles from Boston and 120 from New York City — is its first in New England and only its second in the Northeast, after the Hamburg, Pa., site. The day the store opened in New Britain, another new Cabela's opened in Hammond, Ind.

The 185,000 square feet of retail space is not a typical store. Though Cabela's sells clothing, guns, food, camping and fishing gear, automotive equipment, hunting equipment, pet supplies and more, it promotes its business as a sort of natural history museum.

At East Hartford, that includes two 5,000-gallon aquarium tanks with carp, trout and other fish, and a diorama with an elephant, lion, zebra, hyena and other taxidermied African animals.

The store's artificial mountain is also populated by stuffed animals, including a polar bear that reaches out to customers.

And a mounted stuffed bear's head, with eyes and a mouth that mechanically move, beckons children into a shooting gallery with a plea to "try your luck."

"We're a destination," said regional manager Mike Boldrick.

Half of Cabela's shoppers travel 100 miles or more, he said. For example, at its store in Dundee, Mich., license plates from as many as 20 states are typical on a busy day, he said.

Cabela's picked the East Hartford site because it already has many catalog customers in the area — it mails 120 million catalogs a year — and is close to southern New England's coastal fishing areas, Boldrick said. Additionally, the new store was built next to Rentschler Field, the University of Connecticut's football stadium, where on any Saturday afternoon as many as 40,000 fans could be a short walk away.

The destination-retail business is catching on, said Derek W. Leckow, an analyst at Barrington Research in Chicago.