Retail Politics

Are all Whole Foods shoppers ultraliberal, blue-state, wine-sipping, touchy-feely tree huggers? Are all Cabela’s customers right- wing, red-state, beer-guzzling, flag-waving Bambi killers? Of course not, but that hasn’t stopped campaign consultants from using what we buy—and where we buy it—to predict how we’ll vote. Let the war between Camembert and camo begin.

by S. C. Gwynne

January 2006

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Cabela’s began as a mail-order company in 1961, when a good old Nebraskan named Dick Cabela started selling fishing flies. Along with his wife, Mary, and his brother Jim, he soon turned his idea into the biggest outdoor-goods catalog company in the world, one that now mails 120 million catalogs under 76 titles to all fifty states and 120 countries. The scope of the catalogs is mind-numbing: They offer 245,000 products from four thousand suppliers in 99 countries. The catalog business allowed Cabela’s to know precisely who its customers were, where they lived, and what they bought. And this data bank of information—this certainty of the location and buying habits of its customer base—is what led Cabela’s to open retail stores starting in 1987. By the end of 2006, the company will have eighteen megastores like the one in Buda, drawing some 40 million customers each year.

Whole Foods and Cabela’s share another trait too. Because they are more than just places to buy things—“destination retail” is the buzz term for it in the trade—both are prodigious engines of economic development. Cities across the country are falling all over themselves to persuade the two companies to open stores. Cabela’s is such a potent commercial magnet that it can change a town’s fortunes almost overnight, and to attract a megastore, places like Buda must now ante up at least $30 million in tax breaks, infrastructure improvements, and other goodies. In Austin, Whole Foods has become downtown’s main retail focal point, a sort of economic pivot around which future growth will take place. In perfect red state—blue state contrast, Cabela’s stores, which are uniformly exurban, tend to spawn sprawl. Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and other big-box stores like to locate near them, as do national chain hotels, national chain restaurants, and other elements of freeway strip sprawl that Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore once railed against on the campaign trail. Whole Foods, of course, is much less likely to make Al gag: It stands for more politically correct urban infill and the rebuilding of city cores.

But perhaps the most obvious similarity between the two is their understanding that, as lifestyle capitalists, they are not really in the business of selling fishhooks and organic peanut butter. Belief is at the heart of this new, intensely polarized commercial culture, as is the desire to transcend ordinary materialism. At Cabela’s what is being sold is an idea of prelapsarian America, a country of forests and trees and clear streams and mist rising on purple mountains, a more primitive, self-reliant, and nobler America where everyone hunted for meat, where women knew how to shoot, field-dress, and cook a wild boar, and where pointy-headed liberals from Connecticut were not trying to banish God from our schools. Cabela’s is about guns and gun culture and is one of the largest single donors to the National Rifle Association Foundation.

Whole Foods is also selling thin air, but in an even more finely calibrated way. The store promotes vegetarianism, organic farming, support for environmental issues, and the idea of a healthy, disease-free life. The company itself is deeply political and gives 5 percent of its earnings to various nonprofit organizations. It is in the vanguard of more causes than you can shake a sandalwood incense stick at: the organic-farming movement, the anti-genetic-engineering movement, the Save the Chilean Sea Bass and sustainable seafood movements, and the turtle-safe shrimp movements. All of this is visible in the store’s literature and in the store itself. The buyer thus gets a hefty dollop of ideology along with his shrimp—Thai basil udon, bee pollen, or wild yellowfin tuna filet from Tokyo. And it is just this sort of purchase-as-political-act, if you will, that many people think is permanently changing the commercial landscape in this country. In her new book Megatrends 2010, author Patricia Aburdene calls it “conscious capitalism” and predicts that “values-driven consumers” are beginning to effect a revolution in the American marketplace. Whole Foods is her prime example.

Aburdene does not mention Cabela’s, because her conscious capitalism is all about socially responsible investing, yoga, meditation, divine presence, ecological sustainability, and every blue-state, karma-centered, touchy-feely, liberal, elitist notion you might imagine. It would not embrace the idea of bow hunting for elk or blasting cute little doves from the sky. But Cabela’s is absolutely what she is talking about. Cabela’s is all about belief-driven buying.

This is all dazzlingly apparent on the shop floor, a timber-walled area the size of three football fields with an impossibly remote ceiling from which hangs an authentic antique Piper Cub aircraft. That is the first thing you notice, followed by the hundreds of stuffed animal heads mounted on the walls. Then there are three Smithsonian-scale nature dioramas, including a forty-foot fake rock mountain with a cascading waterfall, dozens of vacant-looking furry creatures, autumnal aspen trees, and a real trout pond. There is a 60,000-gallon aquarium filled with freshwater fish, where customers cluster at feeding time, noses pressed to the glass. Behind the camping section, a jokey animatronic deer welcomes you to a laser shooting gallery that reminds you, in case you had forgotten, of just exactly how much fun it is to shoot things. In immediate proximity to these themed attractions—the bait, if you will—is the hook: several acres of camouflage clothing and accessories, enough ordnance to retake Baghdad, row after row of camping and outdoor gear, and more kinds of fishing poles, reels, and lures than you would have given human beings credit for being able to think up.

What put Cabela’s in a class by itself are not only such elaborate entertainments but also its earnest attempts to educate its clientele. The aquarium, for example, is filled with fish from Central Texas streams and rivers that were caught by the store’s staff. A sign helps you tell a bass from a catfish. On one of my visits, an employee trolled a brightly colored fishing lure, with its hooks removed, through the tank. Several hundred customers watched raptly as one fish after another hit the lure and spit it out.

The entire experience was educational in the best sense. Even the snack bar has an educational tilt: Its offerings include elk, wild boar, and ostrich sandwiches as well as bison and venison brats. Cabela’s runs hundreds of school tours through its meticulously labeled dioramas, another of which includes a 12,000-square-foot mountain-themed room called Big Game Country. It is an enormous investment in a part of the store that generates no retail sales at all, and it is evidence of another component to the retail-purchase-as-belief phenomenon that is strikingly similar to the sort of stuff the Whole Foodies believe in: conservation. A sign at the foot of the rock mountain pays “tribute to America’s big-game sportsmen for the ever-increasing number of wildlife we enjoy today.” The sign points out, among other things, that because of the taxes sportsmen pay on sporting goods, the number of pronghorn antelope has grown from fewer than 25,000 in 1920 to more than 570,000 today. Cabela’s stands for hunting and killing things; it also stands for responsible stewardship of the environment. And it wants you to know that.

Whole Foods’ flagship store in Austin also warmly embraces the notion of giantism: Bigger is better; more is better. Here, too, there are theme park—like aspects: a chocolate “enrobing station” consisting of a burbling fountain of pure liquid chocolate into which the store offers to dip anything you purchase, a murmuring brook cut into a limestone patio, live music with big-name Austin bands on an arbor-strewn plaza, an enormous walk-in refrigerator featuring eight hundred brands of beer, wheat grinders where you can mill your own flour, and escalators built like moving sidewalks that accommodate shopping carts. And everywhere there are reminders that the store has a purpose beyond just the crude act of selling people stuff. “Why buy organic cotton?” inquires a sign over the store’s spacious racks of clothing, which include $36 baby tops and $40 yoga pants. Because it “prevents contamination of cotton seeds, which enter the food chain . . . Support farmers and manufacturers by showing there is demand for responsibly grown cotton products.”

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