Dick’s Sporting Goods is selling 8 of its Field and Stream stores to Sportsman’s Warehouse. I’m going to assume those stores will be rebranded, since Dick’s isn’t selling all its stores to the company. There’s speculation that Dick’s will exit the hunting and gun market entirely. I hope that’s the case, because they don’t deserve our money.
7 thoughts on “Some Field & Stream Stores No Longer Dicks?”
Comments are closed.
I wonder about the F&S store up in Erie, PA?
These are some the stores:
Yesterday, it was reported that Dick’s was selling eight of its 35 Field & Stream branded stores to Sportsman’s Warehouse. Seems Utah-based Sportsman’s Warehouse feels the locations (Camp Hill and Altoona, PA, Horseheads and Rochester, NY, Greensboro and Asheville, NC and Troy, Michigan)
Maybe I should just do the research before asking this question, but wasn’t there another, internet-based outfit that operated under the banners of several sporting goods retailers? I recall two as being Dick’s and Sports Authority, at the time. If you ordered something online from any of the involved retailers, the page would look like the retailer’s superficially (banners etc.) but you were actually ordering from a different outfit. I think I compared Dick’s and Sports Authority’s online pages, and while the banners were distinct, the format was otherwise identical.
I am only asking that in the spirit of, we may want to know who we are really dealing with, in the future. We could find ourselves giving Dicks a cut after all.
Never mind. I did some minimal poking around and found that at one point Dick’s had purchased Sports Authority, so maybe that explains what I was seeing.
Nevertheless, I definitely remember hearing that online sales were actually by a third entity, and that Dick’s and other participants only got a cut for the use of their names and images. So my “check out whatever appears to happen” still holds.
Dicks is exiting the hunting market? So they see a niche for overpriced jerseys and jogging shoes? A sporting goods store that does not sell sporting goods, lol.
Just to argue (on the way to an Old Story) I suppose they know their market, and what is selling. I don’t have any statistics, but the hunting market may no longer be as huge as we like to believe it is. Look at the statistics on license sales over the years, steadily declining. Also, the gun market may be too unstable (driven by politics) to be an attractive thing to do business in. I’m thinking how at one big retailer, ammo shelves that were bare (because everything that came in was snatched up) during the Obama years were groaning under an unsold inventory as soon as Trump was elected. Overpriced jerseys may be an easier market to do business in.
Now for the Old Story: We used to patronize Leslie Edelman’s pawn shop in Philadelphia to buy guns and Herter’s shooting supplies in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Then he opened an all-shooting supply store on Route 463 in Horsham in the early 1960s. A few years later he opened a number of guns and hunting equipment stores in the Philadelphia region. But where the single store in Horsham had never failed to have even the most obscure item I ever sought, the multiple stores seldom had anything I was looking for. I remember going into the local one with a list, and coming out with nothing, after chiding the clerk that “you can’t do business from an empty wagon.” Eventually all those stores closed, and Les Edelman Jr. founded Kimber.
Evolving from a Philly pawn dealer to a quality gun manufacturer was a remarkable evolution, but also evidence of a changing market and a changing market strategy. There plainly wasn’t enough money in inventorying obscure and arcane items for guys like me, and more money in inventorying the hunting/shooting equivalents to “sports jerseys.”
I’m also thinking of three local gun shops in Bucks County that closed their doors and went out of business — as opposed to being taken over by someone else. Other outlets were opened that replaced them, but they don’t seem like the gun shops I remember, 30 to 60 years ago. Things change.
meh, some CEOs are so comfy that they run the business like a hobby, for ego, more so than an actual business. Much like the way many NFL and sports franchise owners run their franchises (Dan Snyder comes to mind). Other CEOs have been running the business so long that dont realize that the world has changed around them. Remember that time Warren Buffet and also Bloomberg claimed that the internet was a fad? Eventually they conceded. Dick’s internet retail strategy is a joke, but mostly on them. People can go to Dicks, browse, then buy it from Amazon cheaper and have it at their door next day (or earlier: Sunday morning I ordered some Magpul stuff off Amazon and it arrived in the evening). Even before all the bullshit with Dicks, I stopped going to their stores for hunting stuff because its all online, and their delivery when you order it online sucks donkey balls. If I want broadheads, arrows, whatever, I can order it from the tree-stand and have it at my door next day. Midway, Brownells, and a few other places were better than Dicks 5 years ago and have gotten better.
I could probably name 250 CEOs who have jumped the shark and ran their business into the ground.
Stack is a moron, he thinks its still 1985. ANd if you invested in Dicks, you would wish you invested in the S&P500, or just about anything else over the last 3,5,10 years. The only reason hes not gone is he owns about 20% of the company, so its hard to fire him. He would still have a seat on the board. He will be retired and rich having sold a ton of stock by the time Dicks goes into bankruptcy or gets bought out by private equity.