OLYMPIA – You’ll find him tucked back off an alley in a neighborhood of warehouses and empty buildings, and it’s by appointment: He’s the guy with the key.
His vocation is golf teaching pro. These days, he’s a liquidator. He’s making a little something off each sale he makes of the marked-down golf gear, so don’t feel too bad for Kris Swanson. But there is a sadness in the enterprise.
“That’s what Phil Mickelson plays,” the affable Swanson says to one customer, who is combing through a golf bag (it’s for sale, too) full of wedges of various degrees and brands.
In that same room, other clubs in other bags are on sale for the same 30 percent off, including the latest generation of woods and irons by the big boys, the Callaways, TaylorMades, Pings and Clevelands.
In the adjoining room, the walls are lined with golf bags. In the biggest room, just inside the door, you’ll find stacks of golf shoes, balls, gloves, various gadgets and gimmicks, and a couple racks of shirts, shorts, skirts and outerwear.
Get ‘em while you can … 50 percent off.
What’s left here is the bank-owned inventory of the Golf USA store in Lacey, Wash., whose owners closed up shop last month. The closure left part-time employee Swanson without a day job and Washington state’s capital region with only one remaining golf retailer (outside the golf course pro shops), and it’s more of a specialty store than full-service, big-brand seller.
It’s a buyer’s market today, in these rooms in an empty building several blocks from the retail hub of downtown Olympia.
There are deals to be had, but it’s hard not to feel like a buzzard, circling and circling and biding my time until the body is really near death … or when the markdowns reach 70 percent.
One man’s hero is another’s villain, and there are neither in this story. It’s no secret, if you play golf at all and live in the modern world, that the deals are better online – the auction sites, the discount sites, Craig’s List.
You don’t get any face-to-face customer service, but that’s a dying art anyway, right? Who really needs a conversation with a knowledgeable proprietor? Who has time to be fitted with clubs that suit you, that you get to try before you buy?
It’s a tough world for brick-and-mortar sellers, who deserve a fair price in return for the old-school services they offer. But it’s tough all over, and nobody should feel bad for paying less if you have a chance.
Traditional retailers are doing what they can to coexist with the cyber-market. My home course pro shop, just for instance, offers a price-match of the online retailers. But I wouldn’t feel good about calling him on it.
It also doesn’t feel good picking over the remnants in a sale like Swanson is overseeing. Be assured: If you don’t find what you’re looking for at a price you can live with, there will be other sales … of other failed golf shops, in other towns, in other empty buildings on other back streets.
It’s nobody’s fault. Still, it’s sad.
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