New Jersey’s biggest Bass Pro Shops is still months from opening. The hiring, however, starts this week.
Bass Pro Shops is holding job fairs Wednesday and Thursday at the Sheraton Edison ahead of the planned fall opening of its 200,000-square-foot Outdoor World in Sayreville — a project more than a decade in the making that will be the largest single-level Bass Pro Shops location in the country.
The store, part of the Riverton retail complex along the Raritan River, has been delayed repeatedly. It was originally tied to a redevelopment plan announced back in 2013, slipped to a spring 2026 target earlier this year, and has now landed on a fall opening — still without a confirmed date.
What hasn’t changed is the scale of the ambition.
The store’s centerpiece is a 65,000-gallon Shipwreck Aquarium, paired with a 12,000-gallon ray touch pool, live jellyfish, and an interactive “Sketch Aquarium” for kids — an entire wing of the store built less around shopping carts and more around marine education.
Company founder Johnny Morris, in a release, said company is working to create “an unforgettable experience” for the region.
This location and concept will be unlike anything ever seen in the outdoor retail industry and truly opens a new chapter in the Bass Pro Shops story,” he said.
Morris — who bills himself as “The Walt Disney of the Outdoors” — has built the Bass Pro Shops brand on the idea that a trip to the store should feel like an outing, not an errand. The Sayreville store leans into that fully, with a design team building out localized imagery and exhibits meant to highlight conservation alongside retail.
The Riverton site itself has been one of Sayreville’s longest-running redevelopment stories. Built on the former National Lead property along the Raritan River and Raritan Bay, the 400-acre site has been in various stages of planning and construction for more than a decade, with Bass Pro Shops as its anchor tenant from the start.
The store sits just off the Garden State Parkway near the Driscoll Bridge, visible to the hundreds of thousands of vehicles that pass the site daily. It marks the second Bass Pro Shops location in New Jersey, joining the company’s existing Atlantic City store.
For now, the most concrete next step isn’t the grand opening — it’s the staffing. The Wednesday and Thursday hiring events at the Sheraton Edison in Raritan Center mark the clearest sign yet that a fall opening is on track.
