Hunting Shops Are Having a Slow Year. Why?
From Slate:
This fall should have been an excellent time for companies that cater to well-heeled hunters and fishers. The farm-based economies of the Great Plains and Midwest are roaring. And the onset of the presidential campaign season, during which you often find city slickers posing as big-game hunters, usually provides a boostтАФfor retailers and comedians alike. President Bush, in what now looks like foreshadowing, went out to shoot for doves during his 1994 gubernatorial campaign, and instead brought down a killdeer, which was protected by state law. John Kerry's duck hunting in the fall of 2004 failed to sway rural voters. More recently, tough guy Vice President Dick Cheney bagged a septuagenarian, and ex-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney bragged about his long history of hunting varmints.
But this fall has been a terrible one for those in the business of making and selling rifles and shotguns. And for the dwindling core of optimists who believe the American consumer is doing just fine, the stock charts of companies like Cabela's, Gander Mountain, and Smith & Wesson should cause them to check their scopes.
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