A loud report

On the Fourth of July, Feldpausch will take his stash of 500-gram cakes (the maximum amount of explosive powder allowed by law) and Pro Shells to his cottage near Cadillac, screw the boxes down to the dock and let ‘em rip.

“I like the larger loads. I like the show,” he said.

The cart’s fold-out front, where eggs and fruit would nestle at a grocery store, bristled with a battery of 3-inch artillery shells that “put on a heck of a bang,” Feldpausch said.

“Bam, bam, bam! There goes 80 bucks, quick,” he said with a pyrotechnic waving of hands.

Pro Shells, Big Fireworks’ signature artillery shell, are the hot item this year, at two boxes of 24 for $100. The plain brown packaging and military stencil letters on the box look extra badass among luridly colored packages with names like “Total Annihilation,” “Mass Explosion,” “Sexy Bitch” and “Wife’s Revenge.”

Meanwhile, under the store’s giant inflated gorilla, Josh Moll and his brother, Jason, were piling boxes into a van. The two young construction workers from Whitmore Lake were in Lansing for a class on asbestos abatement and a mandatory stop at Big Fireworks.

“I look for the biggest and the loudest,” Josh said with a laugh.

“Biggest and the loudest,” Jason echoed. “That’s what we walked in and asked for.”

Inside the store, Allan Elliott, retail operations manager, was enjoying a lull.

Elliott is holding up well under 13- to 15-hour days, bouncing between Big Fireworks retail stores in Lansing, Grayling, Waterford, and Westland.

A couple pushed a cart up to him.

“These all right? Two for a hundred?” the man asked, pointing to the Pro Shells. He asked Elliott about the difference between the Pro Shells and a new competitor, Executioner. Its blood-red box boasts 24 different effects, including a purple and green peony, crackling bursts and strobes, which Elliott poetically described as “light falling down.”

The lady pointed to Executioner.

“Whey don´t you just get these? They’re fine,” she snapped, then turned to Elliott.

“He loves the fireworks,” she explained, as if he wasn´t standing next to her. “Do you have Gorilla Glue?”

They did. (How could they not, with a giant gorilla on top of the building?) While Elliott directed her to the glue, another staffer could be heard talking with customers a few feet away.

“Nice big burst, real loud, real loud,” he was saying. Several more customers walked in. The lull was over.

“It picks up every day up to the Fourth," Elliott said.

On the second and third of July, thousands of people move through the store. The staff doubles from about 12 to 24, with two new cash registers to move things along.

“Fireworks, to a lot of people — it’s like drugs,” said Jan Stajos, Big Fireworks´ CEO. “They are addicted to them. Thank God. I´m glad. People spend 500, a thousand dollars. You’d be amazed.”

Lansing-based Big Fireworks, one of a handful of fireworks wholesale giants in the United States, is flourishing. The American Eagle Superstore on Larch and a handful of retail outlets, mostly in Michigan, are only a fraction of the company’s nationwide business.

Last week, Stajos and her staff were in rush mode at the 50,000-square-foot warehouse and headquarters on Remy Drive in west Lansing.

Jan’s deceased husband and co-founder of the company, Bill, looked down from the wall, puffing a cigar. On the desk was a basketball signed by Tom Izzo, who stopped by June 16 for fireworks to shoot off at his nephew’s wedding in Grand Haven.

The fireworks business is recession-proof. Only the 2012 drought and consequent fireworks bans in many states put a temporary crimp in sales.

“I guess people have to have some fun,” Stajos said. “Maybe they can’t afford to take a big vacation, but they can still have their beer and their fireworks.”

There were no fireworks for Jan and Bill Stajos until about seven years into their marriage.

In 1977, Jan Stajos found a check in the mail for $3,500.

She was working at the Knight Cap. Bill Stajos had been unemployed for nine months. Without telling his wife, he had scrounged $120, sunk it into the stock market and reaped a modest dividend.

She wanted to pay some bills with the money, but he, a fireworks fan, was weary of the restaurant business. He was determined to use the windfall to peddle fireworks. She tried to talk him out of it.

“Thank God he didn’t listen to me,” she said.

They bought their retail outlet, American Eagle Superstore, on Larch in the early 1980s. They moved the wholesale business from a warehouse in Potterville to the Remy Drive in 2009.

Jan Stajos didn´t want to give exact sales figures, but Big Fireworks has become a multimillion-dollar operation since 2000. Sales growth has averaged 15 to 20 percent a year over the past 15 years. A new warehouse, double the size of the one on Remy Drive, is planned for a 30-acre parcel on West Grand River.

As of 2015, 26 states permit the sale of all or most consumer fireworks, and the number is growing. This July Fourth, consumer fireworks will become legal in the key state of Georgia, and several other states are considering doing the same.

“We pick up two or three states every year,” manager Shawn Conn said.

Cash-strapped states are finding fireworks revenue irresistible. Fireworks sellers pay a fee ($400-600 in Michigan) and purchases are taxed (at 12 percent in Michigan).

Inspecting the warehouse last week, Conn saw a lot of exposed yellow floor lines.

“I haven’t seen it like this in a long time,” Conn said. “You want to see crumbs on the floor on the fifth, and we’re getting there.”

The Fourth of July is like “concentrated Christmas,” Conn said, but Big Fireworks is a year-round business. Fireworks are finding their way into weddings and other events. There’s also Memorial Day, Labor Day and, more recently in Michigan, New Year’s Eve.

“It´s actually the safest time to use a firework,” Conn said. “The snow gives natural protection.”

New Year’s Eve rivals the Fourth of July in the South, Conn said, especially in Kansas and Florida.

Despite the flush times, a supply crunch is threatening the business, said Eric Stajos, Jan’s son and probable successor as CEO.

About 2,000 factories in three areas in China´s mountainous Hunan Province make about 95 percent of the world’s fireworks.

“It’s weird, because certain factories can produce certain things and others can’t,” Eric Stajos said. “The formulas are passed down through generations.”

“They´ve been making them more than 2,000 years and they’re the best at it,” Conn said. “They know what makes a green, red, what makes a curlicue, what makes it go up. It’s more of an art than a science. India has been trying to get into the trade, but they don’t know what they’re doing.”

Eric Stajos first went to China 18 years ago and goes back every year. He said China’s safety regulations have improved since then, but the industry still isn’t attracting young workers.

“It´s mostly older people now,” he said. “Younger people don’t want to work there anymore because it’s not an easy life. It’s tough, with a lot of manual labor.”

It’s also dangerous. A September 2014 explosion at a factory in Liling killed 12 people and injured 33.

No wonder the recent opening of an iPhone factory in Hunan province siphoned off a lot of the work force.

“They’re working now in a factory that’s air-conditioned, clean,” Stajos said.

“Making iPad covers are much better jobs for them,” Conn said.

A factory might consist of a cluster of 20 pole barns where fireworks are assembled. Mixing stations are tucked into a mountainside at 20 feet apart “so if there is an accident, it only involves one person, not the whole factory,” Stajos said.

To sharpen the supply crunch, demand for consumer fireworks is growing within China, as laws are relaxed and disposable income grows. Recently, the Chinese domestic market overtook the American market for the first time.

“Our stuff doesn’t get produced until after the Chinese New Year, and that was three weeks late this year,” Eric Stajos said.

He’ll be back in Hunan Province later this month, making next year’s order.

By then, Allan Elliott’s 13-hour days will be over and he’ll be kicking back. After the Fourth, he spends a week at Houghton Lake to unwind — sort of.

“Everybody expects me to bring fireworks,” he said.