It’s a cool, fun, new toy. And it’s big.
That’s how one Cabela’s corporate official described the company’s new $88 million investment in Tooele County.
Cabela’s held a ribbon cutting and open house Wednesday for its new catalog order and distribution center located in the Ninigret Depot northwest of the Tooele County School District office.
Speaking at the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Doug Means, executive vice president and chief supply chain officer for Cabela’s, called the building a “cool, fun, new toy” and “an amazing place,” but he also went on to say the ceremony was about more than a new building.
Cabela’s first came to Tooele County in August 2013 when it rented 325,000 square feet of the former Reckitt Benckiser building in the Miller Business Park, east of the Miller Motorsports Park.
Cabela’s was impressed with the workforce they found here, according to Means.
“We had many choices of where to build this building,” he said. “It’s not about the building, but it’s the people inside that make the difference. We chose to build where we did because of the kind of people that are here.”
The warehouse is not only enormous — 10 football fields could fit inside the structure — it is packed with the latest technology in warehouse management.
At the peak of Cabela’s retail season nearly 400 people will work there, including full-time, part-time and seasonal employees.
The current staff consists of 265 full-time and part-time employees, according to Means. Around 100 seasonal employees will be added as needed.
The building is three stories tall. It occupies 599,324 square feet. The use of mezzanines inside the building brings the total floor space to 889,502 square feet.
“I don’t know how far it is from one end of the building to the other,” said Dan Strnad, an operations manager from Cabela’s Distribution Center in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, “But I know it takes me 25 minutes to walk around the outside perimeter.”
Strnad is helping to train the new “outfitters” at Cabela’s Tooele Distribution Center. Outfitter is the term Cabela’s uses for its employees.
“I track how far I walk each day with my iPhone,” Strnad said. “One day I walked 9.1 miles.”
The distribution center uses 7.9 miles of computer-controlled conveyor belts to move both incoming and outgoing merchandise around the facility.
Incoming boxes are unloaded on the northeast end of the building. They are tagged with a bar code that is printed and attached while the box is moving along a conveyor belt.
The bar code is read and the boxes are sorted and sent to the appropriate place for stocking in the facility’s 1.8 million cubic feet of reserve storage rack space, or the 646,000 cubic feet of active locations in the active “pick module.”
In the south end of the building a machine assembles boxes for outgoing packages.
A bar code or “license plate” is automatically attached to each box. From the license plate, the warehouse’s computer knows what is supposed to be inside the box and where the box will ultimately be shipped.
Using the license plate, the computer guides the boxes through a three-level pick center and then sends the box to the correct shipping door.
A large screw-like device moves the packages up and down the three levels of the pick center.
On each of the levels of the pick center, Cabela’s outfitters, guided by a computer voice in an earpiece, select the proper items from bins to put in the box.
The computer knows where each item is on the pick center’s shelves and gives the list of contents to the outfitter in the order that will fill the box with the most efficient use of the outfitter’s time.
Each level of the pick center holds 76,000 different kinds of items. The shelves in the pick center and the reserve storage are 25 feet tall.
They run in long rows with just enough room for a forklift to move up and down the aisle to add or pull stock from the shelves.
The automation, combined with the shrinking of aisles and walk space, allow the 600,000-square-foot Tooele Distribution Center to handle nearly the same amount of merchandise as Cabela’s other distribution centers that are over 1 million square feet, Strnad said.
During Cabela’s peak season, which usually runs from October through December, the Tooele Distribution Center will average filling 15 to 20 truckloads of merchandise a day.
“That’s only counting the UPS trucks for mail order delivery.” Strnad said.
The Tooele Distribution Center also services 15 retail stores in the intermountain and western states area, he said.
The retail store traffic may be as high as 30 trucks per week. Cabela’s contracts with Phoenix, Arizona-based Swift Transportation for shipping product to its retail stores.
While the distribution center does not have a retail store, online purchasers can select a shipping option to pick up their order at the Tooele Distribution Center and forgo shipping charges, Strnad said.
An agreement with the Governor’s Office of Economic Development provides Cabela’s with a 10-year maximum post-performance tax credit of $693,198. Each year that Cabela’s meets the criteria in the agreement, it will earn a portion of the tax credit incentive.
The agreement requires Cabela’s to create approximately 250 jobs, 85 of which must pay at least 100 percent of Tooele County’s average annual wage of $42,518.
Cabela’s estimates it will add $30 million in new wages over the lifetime of the agreement. GOED estimates the company will pay $3.4 million in new state taxes over the 10-year period.
Tooele City Council members, acting in their capacity as the board of directors for the Tooele City Redevelopment Agency, approved a performance-based tax incentive for the new distribution center that will return up to $4 million of property taxes to Cabela’s over a 15-year period.
The agreement with Tooele City requires Cabela’s to build a facility of at least 550,000 square feet with a minimum assessed value of $40 million to receive the incentive, according to Randy Sant, Tooele City’s economic development consultant.
The new facility has met that requirement, Sant said.
The company must also employ at least 178 full-time workers or $5,000 will be deducted from the incentive for every employee less than 178, according to Sant.
Cabela’s was founded in 1961 when Dick Cabela began selling flies for fly fishing through a newspaper ad in Casper, Wyoming.
While mail order catalog sales built Cabela’s in its early days, today Cabela’s offers a wide selection of outdoor products through catalog orders, digital sales, and a growing number of destination retail stores.
Cabela’s opened 14 retail stores in 2014 for a total of 64 stores in the U.S. and Canada. The company has plans to open an additional 13 stores in 2015, according to its 2014 annual report.
The company ships merchandise to all 50 states and 125 countries and reported $3.6 billion in revenue for 2014.
Tommy Millner, Cabela’s president and chief executive officer, traveled from Cabela’s headquarters in rural Sidney, Nebraska to speak at the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
“I would like to thank Tooele City and their mayor. They made our decision to locate here nothing more than spectacular,” Millner said. “We are very much a family company and we promise to be a great partner in the community.”