The Bass Pro Shops is bigger than you think it will be. This is true of all of the outdoorsy retailer’s locations, but it’s especially true of the one retrofitted into a 32-story metal pyramid on the banks of the Mississippi River. Located in downtown Memphis, Tennessee, the mammoth structure once held an arena for the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies. Now it houses the largest Bass Pro Shops in the world, a hunting-, fishing-, and camping-gear store that has been merchandised with Disney-level production values and expanded to encompass a hotel with more than 100 rooms, a wild-game-themed outpost of the Wahlburgers restaurant chain, several enormous lake sturgeon swimming in shallow pools between departments, and at least three live alligators, among other things.
At 535,000 square feet of retail space, this Bass Pro is almost five times the size of the average Walmart. But even that number doesn’t quite capture its almost farcical grandeur. I visited twice last week on a four-day bachelor-party excursion (long story)—once for a DJ night on the pyramid’s third-floor terrace (again, long story), and once more just to wander around the sales floor, which is full of man-made streams and faux cypress trees dripping with decorative Spanish moss. The store’s motif is “lost wilderness,” but I found that it conjured something even more distant: the old-school department store.
Around the turn of the previous century, well-stocked, well-staffed commercial cathedrals sprang up in American cities, delighting a new consumer class. Stores such as Macy’s, Wanamaker’s, and Marshall Field’s not only sold stuff but also positioned themselves as centers of city life, with in-house restaurants, lavish concerts and entertainment, even free child care. Today, most of these stores no longer exist. Those that persist lost the capacity to awe a long time ago, withered down to unkempt, sparsely staffed caverns of clothing racks and scuffed floors.
The department-store dinosaurs died out for a whole host of complex reasons: the rise of Walmart and Amazon, the economic decline of their middle-class customer base, ossified corporate management, private-equity strip-mining. The most recent tale that retailers have been spinning about their own demise is that of consumers’ widespread preference for online shopping. But that theory doesn’t exactly stand up to scrutiny, and lots of stores may have already doomed themselves by using it for too long as a pretense for quick-and-dirty expense slashing. As I wandered contentedly over the wooden-plank walkways in the Bass Pro’s fake forest, alongside crowds of shoppers with armfuls of soon-to-be purchases, it was hard to ignore one problem that retailers are loath to acknowledge: Going to a store that’s actually good at being a store is all too rare.
In the past few weeks, a handful of data points have emerged to bolster this notion. Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that one bright spot remains in American commercial real estate, even as landlords and brokers try to figure out what can be done with the country’s surplus of office space: retail leases. Construction of new retail space bottomed out during the Great Recession and never really got back up to speed. But so far this year, about 1,000 more brick-and-mortar retail stores have opened nationwide than have closed, even with the loss of national chains such as Bed Bath & Beyond. Demand for shop space has stayed buoyant in spite of inflation and high interest rates. Some direct-to-consumer brands that originally forswore brick-and-mortar retail, such as Warby Parker and the bed-linens brand Parachute, have accelerated new store openings in the years since the pandemic’s peak. As it turns out, lots of people still want to try on new shoes or lie down on a new mattress in person.
As The Wall Street Journal notes, this spate of new openings isn’t evenly distributed. These new stores are disproportionately likely to have opened in modern or high-end malls and shopping centers in higher-income areas. In part, that’s likely because the math of building a pleasant store is just more likely to work out if you’re selling more expensive products. Consumers who are less price-sensitive can handle higher markups, and better margins mean more money sloshing around to ensure that stores always look good and are generously staffed with pleasant salespeople. On the higher end, sales require both the customers and the products to feel special.
You might not think of Bass Pro as a luxury store—its ubiquitous logo trucker hats cost a measly six bucks—but it functions under this logic as well. The Memphis store is a flagship just like grand Chanel or Louis Vuitton boutiques in the world’s fashion capitals: lavishly appointed and intended to serve as a marketing vehicle for the brand as a whole, whether or not the specific location is profitable. Bass Pro is a privately held company, so it’s difficult to determine whether any particular part of its business makes it into the black, but in a leaked 2016 presentation to lenders, the company listed 50 percent gross profit margins, and new megastores in Texas, Ohio, and Colorado are in the works. Lots of serious outdoor gear is very expensive (as is the less serious stuff for people in the suburbs cosplaying as outdoorsmen), and some stores also serve as dealerships for fishing boats, four-wheelers, and other sports vehicles. Many of the floor models on display alongside the sturgeon were priced well into the five figures. If you can’t afford one, you can still come in, look at the fish, buy a hat and a bag of store-brand saltwater taffy, and take a selfie on an ATV. (I speak from experience.)
At the low end, the math on well-run stores has gotten worse and worse with time. Companies push prices and expenses as low as possible, which means that stores tend to be understaffed, poorly merchandised, and disorganized. And at any price level, the charms and conveniences of in-person shopping have to be cultivated, which requires corporate oversight that actually understands and values the reasons that people like going out to shop in the first place—a rarer quality in high-level retail management than you might think. But the fact remains: More than 80 percent of retail purchases made in America are still made in person, and industry experts generally agree that that number won’t bottom out in the near future. If you want to sell as much stuff as possible, the internet alone will get you only so far. Eventually, you’ll still need stores, and you still need to find ways to entice people into them, even if you’re not going to invest in all of the bells and whistles.
The recently announced marriage of convenience between the fast-fashion elder statesman Forever 21 and the Chinese upstart Shein is one way to try to do that—and another data point in favor of physical retail’s staying power. Shein, which sells an enormous assortment of very cheap clothing and home goods that ship to American buyers directly from China, has stirred plenty of consumer interest in the U.S., but it doesn’t have any permanent stores in the country. As part of the deal, Shein will have the opportunity to stock its clothes in Forever 21 locations in the U.S., creating what’s called a “shop in shop.” (Forever 21 will also sell its wares on Shein’s website, but the implications of that are a story for another day.) This move has considerable upsides for both companies: Forever 21 has hundreds of stores across America, but the company has been struggling against more stylish and efficient foreign competitors, and it filed for bankruptcy in 2019. Shein, on the other hand, has lots of teenage and 20-something fans and scads of ultracheap product, but it doesn’t have anywhere for Americans to interact with its clothes before they buy them. That’s a considerable roadblock to Shein’s continued expansion, because it has a reputation for poor quality and irregular fits. Shein’s temporary pop-up stores—an ever more common tactic—in the United States have been mobbed with shoppers.
People want to leave their house and go out into the world and do things. Concert tickets are in huge demand, hotels are full, flights are booked up, restaurant reservations are impossible to get. Long before the pandemic put so much of American life online, some retailers assumed that the internet would wipe out our need to buy things in person, and acted accordingly. But that was never going to be true, and the inadequacy of internet-based life has become screamingly clear for millions of people in the past few years. Now many of the stores that want those people’s business are going to need to figure out how to retrofit a genuinely good shopping experience into the real estate they’ve left languishing for years. Some of these locations are almost certainly too far gone. But if good merchandisers can put a theme-park-quality Bass Pro into a largely abandoned pyramid, they can probably do anything—as long as they have the budget for it.
