Everyone loves to use the fallback "economy" excuse. It is not the economy. Pool in Calgary was crumbling all around us, pool halls closing, the leagues shrinking, the large tournaments becoming more and more rare even when the economy was booming. In Calgary we never really got hit with a huge economic downturn, people make lots of cash there and the unemployment rate is very low.
Now I am in Fort McMurray and the average household income is $186,000/year in a city that has a population pushing 100,000 people and we had the only pool hall in town close down due to a lack of business. The problem is not that people don't have money, in this town people have tons of disposable income, the problem was the pool hall was a POS hole in the wall and no one wanted to hang out in it. I went into it back in 2008 and the place was dead, dingy, and boring, so I left. If a pool hall cannot attract ME, a diehard pool fan then it is in trouble.
Pool is simply not marketing itself right or targeting the proper segments of society. It is not creating the right image for itself and the right marketing strategy. People don't want to hang around in crappy family style billiards halls. If that is all the people you are targeting this sport at can afford then YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG. Stop trying to squeeze $10 a visit out of a segment of the population that has no money to spend.
We need to go back to the origins of this game.
We went from a game reserved to the royalty, to a game played in crappy family pool halls, we need to go back to billiards being a well respected great time out in really nice billiard clubs.
:smile:
