Tag Archives: Bass Pro Shops

City of East Peoria, General News

Thinking about Bass Pro Shops

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I’ve been watching the new Bass Pro Shops materialize in East Peoria, and I got to thinking about a statistic I read in the Journal Star when it was announced they were coming to town. The Journal Star reported in May last year that Bass Pro Shops “attract an average of 3 million people a year to each store,” according to East Peoria Mayor Dave Mingus.

I thought it would be interesting to look at these numbers a little closer. For instance, three million visitors annually comes out to roughly 8,219 visitors per day. There are 22,638 residents in East Peoria (2000 census). So if a third of the East Peoria population visited Bass Pro Shops every day, they would get 3,000,000 visits. But this is a regional draw, so I also looked up the Peoria Metropolitan Statistical Area, which has a population of 366,899. If the entire MSA population (which includes all residents of Peoria, Tazewell, Woodford, Marshall, and Stark counties) visited Bass Pro Shops 8 times a year, they’d get 3,000,000 visitors a year.

Six Flags gets about 24 million people a year at their 19 theme parks, which is an average of 1,263,158 people per park — not even half the number of visitors to Bass Pro Shops, although presumably Bass Pro Shops doesn’t charge admission. WalMart, which also doesn’t charge admission, and which people patronize often for their daily needs, brings in about 176 million customers per week to their 8,500 stores; that’s about 1,076,706 people per store annually — just over a third the number that reportedly visit Bass Pro Shops each year.

“In 2008, Illinois welcomed nearly 88 million domestic visitors […] 67.8 million for leisure purposes,” according to the State of Illinois. There are currently two Bass Pro Shops in Illinois, which could account for up to six million — or nearly 10% — of those leisure visitors. The Museum of Science and Industry brings in about two million visitors annually, only two-thirds the draw of Bass Pro Shops. The Field Museum only gets 1.75 million visitors.

My point is that I’m skeptical of this three-million number. First of all, how do we know the reported numbers for existing stores are accurate? Aren’t we just taking the privately-held store’s word for it? Don’t the numbers sound a bit high? Secondly, even if we concede that those numbers are accurate, so what? Just because a store in St. Louis brings in four million customers doesn’t mean that East Peoria, Illinois, is going to have the same success. There are some differences between St. Louis (“Gateway to the West”) and East Peoria (“Gateway to Germantown Hills”) that I believe are self-evident.

Don’t get me wrong. I anticipate that Bass Pro Shops will bring in plenty of customers. I just don’t think it’s going to bring in three million a year. And I’m beginning to see why East Peoria opted to construct the site and building themselves. This puts them ahead of Bakersfield (CA), Decatur (AL), and Augusta (GA). Those cities announced they were getting a new Bass Pro Shops in 2007 and 2008, but are still waiting for private construction to begin. Buffalo (NY) announced they were getting a new Bass Pro Shops in 2004, but the deal fell apart last year after the city got tired of waiting. East Peoria, in contrast, already has a 20-year lease with Bass Pro Shops, which it approved last July.

City of East Peoria

Everyone’s atwitter about Bass Pro Shops coming to EP

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You’d think it was the biggest thing to hit Illinois since Caterpillar decided to locate their world headquarters here. A large chain store — Bass Pro Shops — is going to open a location in East Peoria by the river next year. Not many details are available about the deal, but the Journal Star article does say this:

The store will be about 145,000 square feet – almost twice the size of the Kohl’s department store on Main Street – and take up just more than 20 acres of the 35-acre site. It will produce about 300 full-time jobs when completed, and at least another 200 full-time workers will be hired during construction…. [T]he deal between the city and Bass Pro Shops is unusual in that East Peoria will own the land, building, parking lot and road leading to the store. Bass Pro Shops will be the tenant.

The city will issue $40 million in bonds to pay for the project, which will be paid off through sales and hotel/motel taxes. Further details about the deal will be released at upcoming council meetings.

Readers of my blog will not be surprised that I don’t get all excited about big box stores. According to glassdoor.com, most local jobs at Bass Pro Stores are in the $8-$12/hr. range, or about $17,000 to $25,000 per year. These aren’t what one would call “living wage” jobs. The construction jobs will be good, but temporary.

Of more interest to me is the City of East Peoria’s development plan, since it will undoubtedly be used as a benchmark for future City of Peoria projects, unfortunately. While the amount — $40 million — is the same, it’s really not the same deal as Peoria’s downtown hotel plan. Peoria is giving the $40 million to a private developer who will then own the whole block and be responsible for the maintenance of all the structures; furthermore the property will be on the property tax rolls. East Peoria, in contrast, will own the Bass Pro Shops building and grounds, making Bass Pro merely a tenant, meaning they will get no property tax revenue on those twenty acres. So East Peoria is now in the land development business, evidently. I wonder if East Peoria will be charging its tenant any rent. It appears they won’t, since the paper says the bonds will be paid off with taxes.

On the plus side, Bass Pro Shops actually has a track record of drawing in a lot of local and regional customers, unlike the current hotel and museum market. So sales tax revenue is more likely to go up. Most of that additional sales tax revenue will come from East Peoria, but Peoria will get some spillover, which is good.