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High-Stakes Competition
In Orange, sporting-goods chains to duke it out on Post Road
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Business New Haven
4/15/2002
By: E. A. Linden
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Dick's Sporting Goods was founded 54 years ago with $300 - which came, literally from Dick Stack's grandmother's cookie jar. The family business has since expanded to cover the eastern half of the U.S. The retailer has now set its sights on a nearly two-year-old vacancy left by Shaw's Supermarket at 538 Boston Post Road in Orange.
Dick's was expected to breeze through the site-review process at an April 4 hearing before the town Plan & Zoning Commission that Mitchell Goldblatt, Orange's first selectman, calls “perfunctory.”
Says Goldblatt, “We will review what architectural changes they will make to the site to be sure they are in compliance, but I am expecting that this will be a speedy approval because it will help the east end of the Post Road,” a portion of commercially-zoned Orange that has in the recent past seen more vacancies than vitality.
As Goldblatt explains: “Two years ago we put together a committee focusing on that end of the Post Road because of the significant vacancies. Since that time Best Buy, Staples and the Burlington Coat Factory have come into the old Sears building. Dick's is exactly the kind of store we are looking to bring into the [neighboring] space.”
John Duncan, regional vice president for Dick's, is also confident that the location is right for a Dick's store.
“From a community standpoint, we look for [a population] focused on sports and outdoor activities,” Duncan explains. “From a retail standpoint, we are looking to be near other big-box stores like Circuit City or Best Buy, other stores attracting an active upscale consumerist.”
Sports Authority, Dick's closest competitor, has a store just four miles south on the Post Road in Milford, but the competition does not faze Duncan, who stresses Dick's “uniqueness” as an enterprise.
“At 50,000 square feet, we are slightly larger than a football field and we are a store full of individual specialty shops,” he says. “The golf section, for example, has a PGA pro and a putting green, the hunting section has its own sportsman's lodge and the athletic footwear department has a mini-track where you can try out the shoes. Our stores are very interactive.”
If everything goes as planned, the first Dick's store in southern Connecticut is slated to open early next spring.
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