Bowling gets a makeover - pins on strings!

[thewayne]

There's going to be a lot of unhappy bowlers! The traditional pin setting machines will be going away over time. Now the organization that supervises tournaments in the USA has approved string-driven pin resetting! Instead of the sweeping arm that knocks the pins into a hopper and the mechanism then aligns the pins and redeposits them on the lane, each pin has a cord attached to it. After the ball knocks the pins down, the mechanism reels the pins up into a cutout template that recenters the pins, lets them stabilize for a minute, then lowers them back down into position.

The good side: saves the bowling alley a TON of money! It's expected it could cut their electricity costs in half. One reports that they have a full-time mechanic on-hand to maintain the pin-setting equipment and they pay over $3,000 a month on parts!

The bad side: it changes both the physics of the game and also the acoustics! The change in physics because the pins are no longer independently-moving objects: their motion is somewhat constrained by the cords, and it's possible to knock down a pin without the ball or a pin coming into contact with it! A cord contact can take down a pin, leading to some interesting effects. The sound change is going to cause some disappointment from not getting the satisfying *CRASH* of all the pins going down in a strike.

The economics are very important for the sport to survive. In the '60s when bowling was pretty much at its peak, there were over 11,000 bowling alleys across the USA. Now there's only 3,000 or so.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/bowling-that-simple-game-of-our-youth-is-being-turned-upside-down-by-technology/ar-AA1kiRwK

Comments

[rain_gryphon]

Well, that sucks. The deeply satisfying noise is one of the best things about bowling.

[thewayne]

It certainly was.  And the article also said that they're going to drop a visibility shield so you can't see the pins being reset!  That is also a disappointment for me.

[rain_gryphon]

Way back when, they used to hire teenagers to manually reset the pins.

[thewayne]

When my dad was a teen back in the '40s, he worked as a pin boy.

[armiphlage]

With industrial vision systems and robotic arms dropping in price, that might be an alternative.

[thewayne]

Except there you're getting back into expensive to maintain systems.  This string-based system seems to be low in part count and pretty simple.

[bibliofile]

A former flatmate (in the '80s) knew how to do this, from hands-on experience.

[white_aster]

....huh! I bowled a lot in my youth, and I'm sitting here envisioning this and I can definitely see how that would change everything about how I was taught to bowl. Not that I got terribly complex (I never learned to curve/spin the ball).

Also, I can hear that sound of a solid set of flying pins in my mind right now. :P It would certainly make it easier to bowl when you have a headache, though!

Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

They can try, but it's liable to drive away their current customer base. That's a huge change to the skills and experience of the sport -- which is what attracts people to it.

So, the next move: are people willing to pay more for a classic experience?

Re: Well ...

[thewayne]

There's also the variable of if the bowling 'federation' will sanction tournaments at the older model bowling alleys.  Could it splinter the league?  I agree, it may require adjusting techniques, which is going to tick off a lot of serious players and pros.  So did the change from wood lanes to synthetics.

Re: Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

It's certainly the kind of thing people can split over, if it tampers with their ability to enjoy the sport.

Take synthetic surfaces. Some I find tolerable, or nice to stand on as a work mat -- but I wouldn't want to run even a few steps on one. Others are unbearable underfoot. Wood is great; it can be firm or springy as desired, but it's not squishy like synthetics in a way that can throw off balance.

[disneydream06]

Scoring sounds like it's going to be a mess if pins are going to go down without being hit by the ball. :o
Traditions are a dying breed. :( :( :(
Hugs, Jon

[thewayne]

It happens in a limited number of very specific circumstances, IIRC the article mentioned it had been seen in a 7/10 split situation.

[moxie_man]

Bad move. This will drive away their current customer base as noted by others. Can't save $$$ if you don't have $$$ coming in.

[thewayne]

Definitely a tough thing to do: trying to implement cost savings to keep houses afloat.  I'll bet those pin setting machines are not a lot of fun to work on and are very expensive to maintain.  This seems to be a simple and fairly inexpensive solution, but it changes the dynamics of the game!  So not a great solution.  I don't think robotics is the answer: too slow and probably wouldn't save a lot of money and questionable whether it would be robust enough to be reliable.  Very tough problem to provide a money=saving solution for.

[silveradept]

Bowling alleys have probably also taken a hit from the pandemic, too. They worked well when they were a destination to be at, especially late Friday nights (even if all the music was the radio edits and the bowlers provided all the missing words themselves.) I think of bowling as something fun and social, so assuming any of the lanes around me survive, it'll still be casual, rather than Very Serious.

[thewayne]

Well, although they probably did take a hit from the pandemic, the thing that really hurt bowling alleys is the collapse of the community service organizations such as the IOOF, Masons, etc.  Their memberships have plummeted.  I'm not saying that all those organizations also had bowling teams, but there have been papers done that showed a correlation between community service orgs' declining membership and the decline in community bowling leagues and the closing of alleys. 

[silveradept]

That makes sense as a correlation. For many of those service organizations, whether true or not, or warranted or not, they have a sexism problem. They've spent sufficiently long as the place where the boys go to get away from their wives that they're not getting new people to join. The bowling alley may also be suffering from that perception, even as they try to provide a more family-acceptable appearance and amenities.

[thewayne]

Absolutely, sexism is certainly an issue with these.  I know the Masons have opened up chapters for women, and perhaps done some integration, I don't know about other orgs.  But also mass media with television etc. has hurt their memberships.  The 'everyone into their own cave' society trend where few people know their neighbors has been a huge factor.

[silveradept]

There is that as well, but I also feel like if that's going to be invoked, we have to acknowledge the massive media campaign that's been going on for decades that essentially has been telling everyone "Your neighbor is secretly a criminal waiting for their opportunity to strike. Protect yourself against the [black/brown/foreign] menace and the soft liberal politicians that will enable them to rob you, sexually assault your women, and get away with it!"