Anyone wanna buy a left handed Savage 220?

[Quack]

What a fiasco… I’m glad they are making it right even if begrudgingly

[maplelakeduckslayer]

Nice glad they stepped up

[Fish Felon]

What a joke.....can't believe they were ever considering not taking it back.

When I started at Cabela's it was in customer service/cashier two years before they IPO'ed. This was back when Dick & Mary Cabela would fly to every store to personally handout Christmas bonuses to every employee. I learned a ton about customer service from working at Cabela's. Things they taught me and every other employee......

If a person has a bad customer service experience....on average they'll tell eight people about it. If they are treated with an otherworldly amazing customer service experience....on average they'll tell two people.

Cabela's took back anything and everything.....literally.....I never saw a single returned denied.

Old farmers would bring in old worn out cabela's clothes, boots, coats, you name it. There was a catalog code on every tag we could look up, and it wasn't uncommon to look up a pair of old pants or other apparel to find out if it was still made and what amount to give them on a gift card for the return.....

.....only to find out the last time the item was made was ten to twenty years prior.

It didn't matter. We'd return it, and give them in-store credit at the very least.

We took back so many broken fishing poles where the customer had clearly broken the rod due to their own stupidity and not from normal use or due to a decent it was sickening. There was a page in the employee handbook pertaining to this that listed an example that went [paraphrasing] like this:

"If a customer walks out to their car with a new rod and breaks it in their car door?

Exchange it for a new one.

If they walk out and break it in their car door again?

Exchange it for a new one.

If they walk out and break it in their car door again?

Exchahge it for a new one.....AND then offer them your assistance by asking,

"Would it be alright if I walked out with you and helped you load this in your car so you can go fishing instead of having to waste more of your time exchanging out a broken rod? I'd love to help you get out fishing."

Do Not ever embarrass the customer or make them feel less than for breaking a fishing rod."


Then the company went public and customer service went to shit overnight. Our store went from having six cashiers on every night to closing, to having two on and closing early in the winter months after Christmas. They tried to cut costs at every corner. Employee hours, store hours (to reduce the lighting and heating bill), no more bonuses, and yup....

....we started denying some returns. That twenty old worn out pair of pants that the farmer wanted to bring back because, "they didn't fit how they should," started getting a,

"Whelp, you should've returned them twenty years ago instead of wearing them until they're all worn out. You got your use out of them," which was true and how it probably always should've been, but then again their customer service is a large part of what propelled Cabela's to take off.

My brothers and I would sit in the family room eating a snack after school and flip through Cabela's catalogs relentlessly dreaming of what items we might be able to order. When the store opened in Owatonna I was sixteen and drove my younger siblings there.....it was jaw-dropping stepping in there and looking around. By far the most amazing, coolest, and greatest singular shopping experience in my life. Like kids in the Rockefeller toy store from a Christmas movie.

Nowadays kids don't hunt or fish, don't flip through catalogs, and don't shop in stores. Cabela's is dead and I'm surprised has hung on as long as they have. Think of the added overhead it takes for them to sell anything compared to the same item being sold off Amazon.......cost to pay all the employees, heat the store, turn the lights on, keep the Aquariums with the right temp, aeration, fish food, or pump the waterfall full of clean water instead of nasty algae filled green shit....property taxes, insurance, payroll taxes, etc.

A Cabela's store more closely resembles an amusement park than it resembles an Amazon shipping facility. It blows me away they're somehow still in business. Their overhead has to be ten, twenty, maybe even fifty times what Amazon's is. How they're able to sell similar items at similar prices....similar as within 5% versus not being marked up 50% to a 100% to a 1000% higher than Amazon? Doesn't seem possible.....

....and it isn't, and that's why they won't be around much longer.

[maplelakeduckslayer]

Thing that started pissing me off...and it's not just Cabela's I experienced this at fleet farm just the other night...I rarely go to a brick and mortar anymore. But it started pissing me off at Cabela's years ago

But when you need something now...you can't even get itin a store these days. They don't stock shit anymore I don't know what the point of having a brick and mortar store is at that point. It's like the stock they have at the start of the season is what they have then it's gone for the year.

Years ago I tried to go get a vest for the dog in mid October at Cabela's...3 weeks after hunting opener just coming into the cold weather. I think they carried 3-4 brands of vest then and 3 of the 4 were sold out. So I was left with one option and luckily the size they had fit him. Several other occurances like trying to buy thick gloves for deer hunting but the shelves are empty...in early Nov before winter even hit.

The other night at fleet farm I bought the last dozen pack.of mallards they had, no decoy line left I ended up using my masonry line at home, and bought 50% of their remaining decoy weights.

I dunno I just don't get it I mean there's 1.5 months of hunting left and a stores shelves are bare

Auto parts stores are about the worst there is almost everything is a next day item cause it comes from their warehouse

Menards...I mean I dunno how many times I've gone there to buy charcoal and they are completely out of stock

It just really pisses me off that when you really need something...you can't just go buy it even with a brick and mortar. It never used to be like that and I dunno if it's all the JIT supply chain crap or what but it obviously don't work worth a shit

It'd be easy to blame on covid and employee shortages but I noticed this beginning to occur well before covid

I really try to plan ahead with just about anything I need these days and order it online. I'm already pissed off just having to go to a store and see people...to do that then have the thing be outta stock I wanna kill someone

[Fish Felon]

Quite honestly, it's surprising any retailer would stock any decoys anymore. Duck hunters are a dying breed and have largely aged out, there's a fairly robust secondary market where guys can purchase used decoys for a lot less (think of how many decoys are out there in old guys's garages to how many guys actually hunt), online is obviously how the majority of people are going to shop for that type of hard goods item, and brick and mortars rely on bang for their buck when it comes to floor space....and storage space. Think how much space a box of new decoys takes up in storing it as off season inventory, placing it back out on the floor, and how much of a pain in the ass to ship. Decoys have to be about the worst item to carry in retail history. There's only maybe a 10% margin on decoys.....so they actually lose a store money when you factor in labor, shipping cost, and other overhead it takes to have them as an item in a store.

Cabela's makes more money off of one $300 duck hunting parka than they do off selling twenty dozen decoys......think of how many coats (or other higher margin items) that can fit inside the amount of space twenty boxes of decoys will eat up in a store?

Hell, you're better off selling candy and other junk food items than you are selling decoys.

Back in the day, guys came in would buy all kinds of shit for duck hunting in addition to decoys, including their license. When I worked in Gander Mountain Burnsville in the high school in the late 90's the night before every major opener (fishing, deer, and duck back in those days) there'd be a line of people from the registers all the way to the back of the store. Dudes came in and dropped several hundred on average for duck hunting....guys dropping a grand for the duck season.....as in, they were set....literally bought everything they needed for the year in one false swoop.....things always built the couple weeks before opener up until the crazy night before, and then that was pretty much it. A guy here or there might come in during the season for a new pair of waders after his old pair sprung a leak, they needed another case of shells, or on occasion....they wanted some G&H divers to beef up their late season spread.

Those guys were the exceptions....95% of the money spent on duck hunting shit occurred the two weeks leading up to opener.

So anything after opener still on the shelf you usually were stuck with storing it for a full year up until putting it back out a month before opener the following year. Gander would incrementally up their discount on decoys but when they'd have G&H's for 20% off season end they were losing money on it but did so because that was a better option than eating up a shitload of limited warehouse storage space for the year, or paying freight to ship it back to the merchant for an at cost return. I.E. cost price for decoys they'd get back minus cost of shipping made clearance-ing then out and taking a loss would cost them a smaller loss than returning them to manufacturers...

....and that was back when there was more than twice the amount of duck hunters, and ten times the amount of active duck hunters.

[Drunk_Dynasty]

Shit when I was 17 I had to use a cabela’s catalog as reference material to figure out what kind of hen diver I’d killed.

We had them sh!ts in school and would just page thru them looking at stuff. We didn’t have cell phones and just used our imagination looking at stuff we couldn’t afford but thinking about how we could use it.

I remember having a totaled amount of money based on the catalog and how much I’d need to make in working on the golf course order to get it.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro