Cabela's a bust for Boomtown?

The Reno City Council, or at least that portion of it that's still buying the All-Growth-Is-Good argument that was so relevant in the 18th century, may have found another way to undermine its own ideology with the giveaways that brought Cabela's to Verdi.
"It's been really slow," a Boomtown employee said this week. "Cabela's hasn't done nearly what we expected."
For those who think "a Cabela's" means to sing without accompaniment, here's a refresher: Cabela's is a large, Midwest-based supplier of mostly hunting and fishing gear. It's not a sporting goods store in the stick-and-ball sense, but if your outdoor interests run to blood sports, you can find the implements you'll need to take down everything from bluegill to Cape buffalo.
Don't read a value judgment into this; I'm not making one. I've already spent a couple of hundred dollars in the Verdi store. For my everyday outdoor needs, though, I'll stick with REI.
To entice Cabela's to Reno, the City Council cut a deal. I've forgotten the details, and they aren't important enough here to look them up; it was pretty much a standard business-government accommodation, involving tax breaks, annexation (against the wishes of most Verdi residents including--full disclosure--me) and favorable zoning, all based, if memory serves, on a projection of about 4 million customers a year.
That seemed, at first, a doable number (I know "doable" isn't a real word, but it fits here). Cabela's is a huge draw among people among whom it's a huge draw. I pulled into the parking lot of the store in Sidney, Neb., at 6:30 on a Tuesday morning a few years ago, and there were nearly 400 people waiting for the doors to open,
Then the projections began to slide. Last time I read about it, a year or so ago, I think it was down to 2.5 million (see previous comment about specifics). A highly-placed city official, unnamed here for the same reason the Boomtown employee is unnamed, told me he was thinking of asking the Council to reconsider its deal.
By then they were moving dirt, though, and the colony of yellow-bellied marmots that's entertained generations of Verdi kids had been paved over, and the city official kept his mouth shut. So now we have a store.
Government did what it could to pump the thing up. For a week before it opened, for instance, highway signs notified drivers that "EVENT PARKING" should use Exit 4. Nobody in my neighborhood, a mile from the Exit 4, knew what event they were talking about, but it certainly generated interest that wouldn't have been there otherwise.
I went up on opening weekend, and it was busy but not jammed. The following week I passed through again, and I saw lots of shoppers but, I thought, relatively few buyers.
Yesterday, Monday, I went in to buy some hiking socks and wandered through the place. There were people looking at the mounted animals (taxidermy, not demonstrations of breeding habits) and admiring the fish in the big aquarium, but in the checkout line I had only about a one-minute wait, and the two customers ahead of me covered their purchases with single $20 bills.
Done with that, I walked over to Boomtown to buy a San Francisco paper and pick up a cup of coffee. That's where I met the employee, who saw my Cabela's bag and revealed what I have no reason to doubt: At least for now, at least for Boomtown, Cabela's is a bust. The marmots died in vain.
"No help at all?" I asked. "Those stores draw a lot of people."
"Maybe a little in the restaurant," he said. "I guess they're not gamblers."