All I can contribute is my own experience...I'm a newbie, although I'm a graybeard.
I went over to my local pool room on a Saturday thinking it might be hard to get a table. Never been there. Couldn't find it, had to call for directions. But the parking lot was 80% empty and it turned out most of the people who were there were drinking at the bar. I walked in and I just stood there. I was actually a little nervous because, you know, I'd never been in a pool hall before. There's a little counter inside the door but no one manning it. Finally after I've stood there for what seemed like a couple of minutes a waitress yells over and asks if I need any help.
I said sure.
A minute or two later she comes over and asks if she can get me anything. I'm standing there holding my newbie cue case. I said I wanted to play pool. She gave me a tray of balls and chalk. Didn't want to make conversation.
In the pool area there are maybe half a dozen bar boxes with three teenage males on one. Over on one of the 10 or 12 9-footers a couple is playing, so I mosey around the perimeter of the room and then sort of stop to watch them. They're having an animated conversation and when they see me they stop and look at me, and I say, "How you doing? Just watching." And the guy looks at me and gives me a good get-the-eff-out-of-here look. So I got out of there quick. I go over on the other side of the room and set up and start to hit balls. A whole hour, nobody comes over, nobody says boo.
In the back of the room the only other players are a younger guy giving an older guy some instruction. After a while the younger guy leaves and the older guy keeps hitting balls, so I sidle over and say, "You want to play a game?" He says "Naw," and right away starts packing up, and leaves.
At the end of my hour I wait by the counter some more until the waitress finally comes over again. She said, "Everything okay?" And I say, "Well, I was hoping to find a game." She says, "It's pretty busy on Tuesdays and Thursdays." I paid for the time and left a tip in the jar.
After a few repeats of this I paid my son's friend to help me clear away a space in the basement and went and bought a nice used pool table. Now I play in my basement. I've been back to the pool hall two or three times and one time, a guy working there was actually halfway friendly, in that he said a few words to me he didn't absolutely have to. I still have never found anybody to play a game with me there, and the three occupied tables I saw there the first Saturday, with me on the fourth, are the busiest I've ever seen the tables. The bar varies in the level of activity you see. Sometimes a middling amount of people, sometimes kind of a lot.
I hit balls in my basement every night. If I gotta play alone anyway....
Here's my opinion: you own a pool room, you do a certain amount of promotion. You advertise, you print flyers, you make a web page. But the point of all that promotion is to get a guy to walk in the front door. That's the payoff. You've got a brand new customer. All your advertising and promotion has succeeded. And then you make him stand there and don't give him the time of day and do nothing to make him feel welcome. And you even make him wait a long time for service even though the place is mostly empty.
Well, that just seems like a problem with the business model.
Of course, that's just one room, and it was just a few occasions. Can't even fault that one room, basically. Maybe I just hit them on a slow...Saturday.
I hope some will see my point, it's very, very, important.
