Sports retailer Scheels to open Meridian store with Ferris wheel. Here’s a look inside

It’s hard to say what other store is comparable to the new Scheels in Meridian.

In terms of size, it’s twice as big as the Boise Cabela’s. Its wildlife mountain is larger, too.

Its array of basketballs, running shoes and stainless steel water bottles is commensurate with that of Dick’s Sporting Goods. It carries the usual name-brand outdoor clothing: Columbia, Hoka, Patagonia, Carhartt, Nike, Cotopaxi, the list goes on.

But Scheels also serves food, has an aquarium and offers a small arcade. It has a two-lane bowling alley tucked into a corner of its top floor. What truly sets Scheels apart, however, is the Ferris wheel situated at its center.

The store is set to open Saturday, April 6, at 9:30 a.m., at 700 S. Wayfinder Ave., just beyond a roundabout in the Ten Mile Crossing business development.

It may be the most anticipated store opening in the Treasure Valley since In-N-Out came to The Village at Meridian in December. That restaurant still boasts a constant stream of customers willing to line up outside its door or wait an hour or two in the drive-thru.

Some customers, to be sure, will visit the store for its selection of firearms and fishing gear. But others will go for the experience.

When I arrived Thursday evening for an “early access” event, an employee in a gray polo greeted me and ran her finger down a guest list. She escorted me to a room on the second floor, where about 50 people — giveaway winners, social media influencers and a handful of journalists — awaited a brief presentation, to be followed with a tour.

Tyler Halm, whose title is store leader, asked who had been to a Scheels store before. A number of hands shot up.

Then he played a short video labeled “16x9_Meridian_Sizzle.mp4” on three large screens. There flashed scenes of outdoor recreation, including skiing, mountain biking, hunting and golf, over the sounds of an electric guitar.

One clip, taken from the grand opening of a Scheels in Chandler, Arizona, in 2023, showed a paraglider dropping into the store’s parking lot.

When the video ended, Halm approached a podium at the front of the room.

“At the end of the day, we measure winning by how we take care of customers,” he said. “We send our associates literally all across the country to train in some of the best facilities in the nation so that when you’re standing across from them asking about a product, they’re not reciting the catalog. They’re out in the field doing those things.”

The store has just over 500 full- and part-time employees, he said. Of those, about 60 have transferred from out of state. Halm declined to say how much they’re paid.

The store itself feels like a scaled-down mall, with numerous specialty shops around each corner, such as a candy shop called Fuzziwig’s Candy Factory and a dining area named Ginna’s Cafe, where, if you tire of perusing Scheels’ endless inventory and attractions, you can buy a latte or a cup of soup. They’re also testing out a beef jerky stand, an employee told me.

The entire building occupies about 320,000 square feet, according to Halm.

And there are so many products that inhabit it that it might be an easier endeavor to describe what the store doesn’t have, which isn’t much. It’s the kind of all-in-one store that makes smaller, mom-and-pop stores go extinct.

It has a generous supply of apparel — shoes, socks, shirts, pants, jackets — and plenty of outdoor gear and sports memorabilia, in case you were hoping to pick up a Travis Kelce jersey, which was neatly on display. There are bicycles, barbecues, tents and snowmobiles. I was glad to spot two dozen or so styles of K2 Skates, which I once searched for at several sporting goods stores in the Boise area with no luck.

“It smells so good in here,” one influencer remarked.

The store has a home decor shop as well, featuring a $3,800 Craftmaster living-room sectional and canvas prints of the Rocky Mountains. It has Legos, Barbies and a baby boutique. A Bigfoot photo-op.

During a tour, Josh Reinhart, an assistant store leader, kindly recited the various metrics for each major attraction at my request.

The aquarium that arches over a central pathway is filled with 16,000 gallons of saltwater. Divers come by three times a week to clean the tank and feed the fish.

The Ferris wheel that rises through the middle of the two floors is 65 feet tall. And yes, I did ride it, for about three rotations. It reminded me of being at the fair. Each time I came around, several employees working the station looked at me expectantly. They had already ridden it many times, they said.

On the second floor, over 200 taxidermied animals are mounted on a large faux mountain. Nearby, a gratuitous amount of Yeti coolers take up space aside an arcade game, Big Buck Hunter Reloaded.

Elsewhere, by a walled-off firearm section complete with a sliding-glass-door entrance, are display cases filled with binoculars, scopes and rifles. Atop them perch more taxidermied animals: a cheetah, a brown bear, a 10-point buck. Not far off is a flyfishing section and an archery area where customers can test out bows. A small, yellow airplane hangs from the ceiling.

For all the store has, it has no self-checkouts.

Dawn Heimer, of Boise, was one of five people who entered a Scheels giveaway and won a $1,000 gift card to the store. She told me she was considering using it to purchase an inflatable raft, or perhaps some camping gear for her son.

“What was so funny is, like the week before this I won two tickets to a concert,” she said. “That was through the TV.”

She’d visited one Scheels store before, in Montana, but it was “nothing like this.”

During the tour of the store, we passed dozens of employees preparing for its opening — shelving merchandise, hanging clothing on racks, polishing banisters, sweeping. It’s the employee-owned company’s 33rd store.

Halm noted that the first Scheels store opened in Sabin, Minnesota. The company, headquartered in North Dakota, is named after German immigrant Friedrich A. Scheele, who, with his wife and children, started the small hardware and general merchandise store in 1902 with a $300 down payment.

“We don’t try to be the biggest,” Halm said. “There’s a lot of our competitors that have hundreds of locations. We just want to be the best.”

The store opens at 9:30 a.m. on that first Saturday in April. For the superfans, a party in the parking lot is planned for 7 a.m.

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