Unfortunately, what you are looking at is a snapshot in time that does not exist anymore. I owned one of those places and yes it was great. But over time the of cost to operate begins to overwhelm you.
If I had not been able to add a beverage license the place would have had to close. The problem with a pool room is, there is a maximum amount that people can pay to play pool.
You only have so many tables and so many prime hours in a day/week/month/year when you make your money. You can do the numbers on paper and if you are honest with yourself see how hard it is to survive in the pool room business today.
Without a bar or some other source of income to augment the pool, you can't survive. Here is an interesting fact. I had the original paper work on a room I owned that had opened in 1960.
Lock stock and barrel it cost them $21,000.00 to open the place. That was 12 Gold Crown tables set up by Brunswick, tables, chairs, carpet, air conditioning and so on.
The rent was $160.00 a month. Electric around 2.2 cents per Kilowatthour. Ins $85.00 a year. City and county license $12.00 & $25,00.
The rate to play pool for two players was around $2.40 an hour. Many places charged per player so at $1.20 per hour per player, four players were $4.80 an hour.
Compare that to todays rates. There are a lot of places today that charge $5.00 to play all day. I used to go to a place in the 1970's that also charged $4.00 to play all day, over 40 years ago.
The value of playing pool has not gone up, in fact it has gone down. That guy who was paying $1.20 an hour in 1975, if he had an average job was making $2.50 an hour.
It cost many more times today to operate a pool room, while the value of your product has gone down. Some may differ with my numbers but the point is the same, the pool room has been passed by economically.
They just cost too much to operate today for the income they can provide. At best a pool room without a bar may provide the owner a modest a paycheck. In other words it is just a job.
