It took five years, but Memphis officials last week finally got Bass Pro Shops executives to sign on the dotted line.

Nobody can understand what the folks in Memphis were going through more than we can here in the Buffalo Niagara region, where the wait to hook Bass Pro is at six years and counting.

Fear not, the leaders of the $295 million Canal Side project say. Bass Pro very well could finally sign its lease here within the next couple of months.

The question is, will Bass Pro be worth the wait?

I doubt it. The outdoors store was touted as a destination retailer when Bob Rich and other local officials first pitched Bass Pro as the centerpiece in the harborfront development.

Earlier: Report doubts Bass Pro on tax, job estimates

Times have changed since 2004. While Bass Pro has been hemming and hawing over whether a Buffalo store really is worth it, even with $35 million in taxpayer subsidies, the retailer has opened 26 other stores over the last five years.

It has nearly doubled in size during that time, adding stores as close as Toronto and Auburn, on the outskirts of Syracuse. It has stores in Detroit and Toledo, Ohio. There’s even a Bass Pro in Harrisburg, Pa. All of those are within a five hour drive of Buffalo.

That means Bass Pro devotees, who are supposed to be the ones bringing in outside money to the Canal Side project, now have plenty of choices within a couple hours drive.

Does the Bass Pro fan in Elmira hit the road to the new store in Buffalo, or head south to Harrisburg? If you’re living in Hamilton, do you fight the traffic and run up to the Bass Pro in the Toronto suburbs, or take your chances with a Peace Bridge backup to come to the one in Buffalo?

“Its geographic market would barely extend beyond the limits of Western New York,” concludes a critical report by the Public Accountability Initiative, a local research group that focuses on corporate and government accountability.

It was different a decade ago, when the chain only had 14 stores. Now it has 56. In 2002, the closest Bass Pro to Buffalo was in the Detroit suburbs.

Back then, none of those stores had another Bass Pro within a 100-mile radius of each other. You could have dropped a Buffalo store in there and its 100-mile market wouldn’t have encroached on any of the other stores’ exclusive territory.

That’s not the case now, and it seriously undercuts Bass Pro’s drawing power as a regional attraction, even though the proximity to Niagara Falls and its millions of tourists will help.

That’s important because the big appeal of Bass Pro, whose stores average 3 million visitors a year, was that it could bring new money into the region, rather than just reslicing the same pie.

“This claim that Bass Pro is a sure-fire economic development solution is empirically false,” says Andrew Stecker, the co-author of the report. “We question whether it’s a regional destination of any kind.”

For too long, the Buffalo Niagara region has been looking for a silver bullet to pull it out of its economic doldrums. Bass Pro is one of the latest. And at $35 million, it’s an expensive shot in the dark.