Would you buy a pool room right now?

face it, generally unless really a pool nut like jay who ran a good poolroom, most good business people find a better business to be part of.

poor business people run pool rooms the easy way so less work for them and resulting in little or no profit. as geosnooker said in his post.

dirty old poolrooms with junk food and drink are a thing of the past when a poolroom was the place to hang out.
yes who wants an unsanitary fountain drink from a barrel that is just colored corn syrup.
or beer from the tap lines that have never been cleaned. and microwaved junk food made in china.

336Robin said:

Ah, but for the guy that can beat the odds....turn the tables, there's gold in them there hills.

Click to expand...

YEP!!! Lotto tickets also!

Dan_B said:

...not in the "middle of no where", however, if you were to do so,
would you sell N95 mask at a profit, cost or a loss lead?

bonus?
Is PPE (personal protection equipment) like a N95 mask tax deductible for personal use?

Click to expand...

A good food and beverage operation, even without alcohol as we are, will give you a better chance to make it. Two people can come in our place and eat for $25, can eat and play an hour and a half of pool for $35 or just play an hour and a half of pool for $10. It’s pretty easy to see what you need to do to.

The circumstances and limitations a pool room will be confronted with are daunting as permission to open gets extended.
You need to be patient, cautious and give it a year before jumping into this COVID thing before buying or opening a parlor.
Revenue reliability, fluctuations from restrictions & patronage confidence are things you can’t control & this decides your profit.

buy when prices are low. if you have any business and cant survive a few closed months you are a failure before you even start..

You obviously have never owned a business with employees, premises, etc. There isn’t
any SBA requirement that a new business loan applicant should be able to withstand a
complete closure of their business for several months in order to qualify as a reasonable
business loan risk. If that were the case, there’d be very few loans originated & new small
business openings, well, that would become a rarity. What maha wrote is just an absurd
observation. If there’s any small business entrepreneurs reading it, I hope they chime in
with their opinions. It’s hard to be stay afloat after being told you must close for mths.

ChrisinNC said:

A good food and beverage operation, even without alcohol as we are, will give you a better chance to make it. Two people can come in our place and eat for $25, can eat and play an hour and a half of pool for $35 or just play an hour and a half of pool for $10. It’s pretty easy to see what you need to do to.

Click to expand...

I can't recall, when about your room, if you're family or age requirement? Smoking? Own space?

I know it isn't, I like simple, like the no booze no drama possibly, but then,
what about that comfort zone that works for the dining/socializing/organized/gaming/player(s)
that could be the better part of an evening.

Clean and good is simple; table and food for $35,
I'd like to think you get dinners that don't play but like to maybe catch a good match up while dinning.

maha said:

buy when prices are low. if you have any business and cant survive a few closed months you are a failure before you even start..

Click to expand...

Seriously? Ever run your own business? Have you checked the # of businesses that are NOT going to survive covid? Are you smarter than all those owners?? Your statement is absurd.

Nostroke said:

There are plenty of good businesses-Why take a chance on one that has been on the decline for 30 years?

I would not have bought a pool room for the last 15 years and would not buy one in the foreseeable future.

Click to expand...

How about a pool hall with an arcade attached to it? My hometown pool hall, back in the 90's, was half arcade, half pool hall. It had 12 Valley 8 foot tables, that you could rent by the hour.

The day time rate was $2 an hour, up until 5 or 6pm, and then it went to $4 an hour. It is really too bad that he did not own the building, because the owners drove him out of business by increasing the rent every year, until the rent was more then he could afford to pay, based on how much he was making on the pool hall.

It was a great place for teens to hang out though. Was never a real players pool hall. Just a teen hang out, and I was one of the teens that hung out there. Really miss that place. It was open for 10 years, from 1990, until around the year 2000.

I assume that the only way a pool hall can survive is if you can buy the building, and then make it a pool hall. Maybe get some investors, who have a great love for pool, to help go in on the buying of the building, if one could not pay for everything by himself.

Anyways, Arcades are still a popular business. A really huge arcade opened up a few years ago in Greensboro NC, and it was an instant hit. It was located in an inside mall. The place was huge, and had all sorts of different arcade games, and it had a little pool room right in the middle, that had like 6 9 foot pool tables. They were junky furniture grade tables though, so I never had any interest in playing on them. People were always playing pool on them though, and sometimes I would see guys who actually played decent shooting on the tables.

Dan_B said:

I can't recall, when about your room, if you're family or age requirement? Smoking? Own space?

I know it isn't, I like simple, like the no booze no drama possibly, but then,
what about that comfort zone that works for the dining/socializing/organized/gaming/player(s)
that could be the better part of an evening.

Clean and good is simple; table and food for $35,
I'd like to think you get dinners that don't play but like to maybe catch a good match up while dinning.

Click to expand...

To your last sentence, my answer in our case is not really. 90% of our customers either come in to eat or get take-out food and have most likely never played pool here nor interested in watching someone play pool. Our regular players consider us a pool room with good food, but the reality is, for our regular dining / take-out only customers we are restaurant/grill with a quality product that it doesn’t bother them that they are coming to a pool room to eat - even though many of them likely have gone their entire lives without ever entering a pool room. Without that, we have nothing

Would I buy pool room? Nope...hell no. No money in it.

IMO, there has never been any money in pool rooms.

Then again, some say they have made good money in rooms in the past. Then again, what they consider "good money" may not be what some of us call even making a living.

One man's junk is another man's treasure type thing.....

Me? I don't buy the room....I buy the building...strip mall etc...etc and collect the rent regardless of how well/bad the businesses do.....with 5he exception of pandemics obviously.

Jeff

jrctherake said:

Me? I don't buy the room....I buy the building...strip mall etc...etc and collect the rent regardless of how well/bad the businesses do.....with 5he exception of pandemics obviously.

Jeff

Click to expand...

Now would be the time to buy commercial/strip mall property. If you can talk them out of giving it to you

Bavafongoul said:

You obviously have never owned a business with employees, premises, etc. There isn’t
any SBA requirement that a new business loan applicant should be able to withstand a
complete closure of their business for several months in order to qualify as a reasonable
business loan risk. If that were the case, there’d be very few loans originated & new small
business openings, well, that would become a rarity. What maha wrote is just an absurd
observation. If there’s any small business entrepreneurs reading it, I hope they chime in
with their opinions. It’s hard to be stay afloat after being told you must close for mths.

Click to expand...

I've owned and operated four rooms over a total of twenty two years. I never took a loan of any kind to open or buy any of them! I only had to borrow money from a couple of close friends one time to get my last place built out. They were paid back within a year. I wanted to own my own business and not have it owned by the bank. That's just me though.

I can fully understand the above comments on weathering the current Covid-19 crises. Your biggest expenses are the rent (or mortgage payment) and your employees. During this pandemic, the business owners who will survive are the ones who did not have to pay rent while they were closed and did not pay their employees either while they weren't working. I know that sounds cold but that's the reality of staying above water.

In my last poolroom the most popular fare was fresh pizza made in a pizza oven and bottled beer (Corona, Bud and Bud Light, Michelob and Heinekens). The average ticket was $25-30.
Some will tell you that you can't make money on pool, but if you have sixteen tables going for five or six hours solid every night at $8-10 an hour, plus two bar tables pulling in another ten bucks an hour each, plus all the additional income from members and day time players, you can pull in $750-1,000 a day right there. Now add a ping pong table, foosball, air hockey, pop-a-shot, driving game, shooting game, golf game, juke box and a couple of other popular machines and that can amount to another couple hundred a day.

I never got rich owning a pool room but it sure beat digging ditches.

My only question after reading your last post - Why did you get out of the business?

jay helfert said:

I've owned and operated four rooms over a total of twenty two years. I never took a loan of any kind to open or buy any of them! I only had to borrow money from a couple of close friends one time to get my last place built out. They were paid back within a year. I wanted to own my own business and not have it owned by the bank. That's just me though.

I can fully understand the above comments on weathering the current Covid-19 crises. Your biggest expenses are the rent (or mortgage payment) and your employees. During this pandemic, the business owners who will survive are the ones who did not have to pay rent while they were closed and did not pay their employees either while they weren't working. I know that sounds cold but that's the reality of staying above water.

In my last poolroom the most popular fare was fresh pizza made in a pizza oven and bottled beer (Corona, Bud and Bud Light, Michelob and Heinekens). The average ticket was $25-30.
Some will tell you that you can't make money on pool, but if you have sixteen tables going for five or six hours solid every night at $8-10 an hour, plus two bar tables pulling in another ten bucks an hour each, plus all the additional income from members and day time players, you can pull in $750-1,000 a day right there. Now add a ping pong table, foosball, air hockey, pop-a-shot, driving game, shooting game, golf game, juke box and a couple of other popular machines and that can amount to another couple hundred a day.

I never got rich owning a pool room but it sure beat digging ditches.

Click to expand...

So how I can not imagine Jay digging ditches, or doing manual labor. I think Jay has the understanding, and sense to make a go of a Pool Room, plus he could teach how to play pool, from the prospective of a guy who actually was a money player.

good idea but early, you may wait months or years to open it up and have enough customers to make money, IMO.

There is a poolroom opening now near me.
About 20 minutes away actually.
Been following them on FB.
They have been posting pictures of their progress.
Looks like it's going to be very nice.

Several Valley tables and darts.
Both of which do not interest me.
They have put in several 9 foot GC V's.
And that interests me.
Lighting looks good too.
Now if they put a nice 3 cushion table in then I will get really excited.
Looking forward to it.

who said anything about an sba loan requirements.

what i said any business that cant be closed for a couple months and survive is due to fail before it even starts. which means it is under funded. and you dont run a business that is underfunded and survive and cant pay two months worth of costs.

and if that is absurd so be it.

arcstats said:

My only question after reading your last post - Why did you get out of the business?

Click to expand...

I lost my lease. It's a long story but after Churchill Downs bought Hollywood Park they would not honor the last three year option on my lease. I didn't have the money to fight them so I took a settlement and closed up shop at the end of the year. Believe me I would have liked to have had three more years there. The poolroom was humming and the card room downstairs was paying all my bills! :smile:

lakeman77 said:

good idea but early, you may wait months or years to open it up and have enough customers to make money, IMO.

Click to expand...

My experience has been that it takes about six months of heavy promotion to build your clientele. After that, word of mouth takes over and you should be making money. If you aren't turning a profit after the first year then either you are doing something wrong or you're in the wrong place at the wrong time. :frown: