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

[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!"