Today, Ky and I, along with her sister Dee and fiance Ben, went to Top Golf. For the uninitiated, Top Golf is what you get when you take the humble driving range, and throw a ton of Private Equity cash at it.
The premise is simple: hit golf balls into an empty field, as many times as you like. But at Top Golf, they have pursued some giga-brain strategies:
- Most Driving Ranges (henceforth known as Bottom Golf, or BG) charge per the ball. This makes sense, but once you’re out of balls, you’re probably going to head off. Once you’re gone, so is your wallet. At Top Golf, you pay for TIME, with unlimited balls. This not only feels like a better deal, but it means you’re likely to stay longer, and thus the opportunity to be upsold on food or beverages massively increases. There is no marginal cost to a golf ball being hit, so why not encourage people to hit as many as possible?
- Bottom Golf only appeals to Golfers. Of the four of us (excluding Occi), only Ben knew anything about hitting a golf ball. Playing a game you suck at – unsurprisingly – usually sucks. Golf isn’t table tennis, the learning curve is brutal. However, Top Golf has created various “games” that mean that you can play against one another in such a way that an agricultural hack can score just as many points as a PGA-perfect drive. The “inclusiveness” means that even punters like myself, who know nothing about Golf, will be coming back for more.
- Nail the basics. When going to a driving range, you don’t expect a Michellin Star experience. However, some places either way overcharge, or just provide the absolute worst possible product. The difference between a garbage pile of chips/fries is probably a few cents and a half inch of effort in the kitchen, but the outcome is significant.
Overall, a great experience!
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