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Updated: Outdoor gear giants Bass Pro Shops and Cabela’s will combine in a $4.5 billion deal announced Monday.

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Nearly 2,000 jobs in the Nebraska Panhandle town of Sidney are on the line if Bass Pro Shops makes a bid for local retailer Cabela’s. Two national news wires reported late Sunday that Missouri-based Bass Pro could make an offer as soon as Monday.

If so, Wall Street watchers say Bass Pro could move to consolidate the operations of the merged companies — most likely choosing its current home office of Springfield, Missouri, as the headquarters of the combined company. That would mean an ax could drop on 2,000 Cabela’s headquarters workers in Sidney, a town of 6,800 about six hours west of Omaha.

“The most obvious place to look for synergies is reducing two headquarters to one,” Don Bilson, an analyst with New York investor research firm Gordon Haskett told The World-Herald earlier this year, using a Wall Street term for combining two parts of a company into a stronger single entity.