The Decline of Bowling

At Bloomberg Justin Fox recounts the decline and very slight recovery of the bowling business:

In the late 1970s, just over 9 million Americans belonged to bowling leagues. As of 2017-2018, 1.34 million did. This decline has been much discussed, with political scientist Robert D. Putnam’s famous 1995 essay and 2000 book “Bowling Alone” citing it as a symptom and cause of “declining social capital” in the U.S. due to the “social interaction and even occasionally civic conversations over beer and pizza that solo bowlers forgo.”

Putnam admitted in the book, though, that “only poetic license authorizes my description of non-league bowling as ‘bowling alone.’” Instead, bowling was shifting from something that blue-collar workers did after their shifts to something that kids did at birthday parties and adults as part of a night out with friends.

That’s really just the tip of the iceberg. In 1980 there were about 10,000 bowling alleys in the United States with the average bowling alley having 8 lanes. Now there are as third as many alleys and the average store has 26 lanes. Throughout the Midwest there were thousands of bars which had a couple of lanes of bowling attached. Most of those are gone now.

Contrary to what you might conclude from reading Mr. Fox’s piece, bowling alleys have always derived most of their revenue from their bars. Selling upscale mixed drinks might be new but the importance of their bar business is the same.

Some other tidbits. String pinsetters began to catch on in the United States in the early 1990s when Brunswick began selling a Swiss pinsetter here. I think they may eventually have acquired the Swiss manufacturer. And, as the graph Mr. Fox includes in his piece suggests, labor productivity in bowling alleys actually began to rise in the 1990s after years of stagnation when proprietors began automating their operations. Important factors in that were bar management systems, point-of-sale systems, automatic scoring machines, and backroom computers that tied it all together.

I would also suggest that changing demographics has a lot to do with with bowling’s decline. Also average hours worked per worker per year may have something to do with bowling’s decline and rise.