From The Lever, May 30, 2024:
With the rise of Bowlero, private equity has come for bowling — will your neighborhood alley ever be the same?
It’s a Tuesday night in Hazlet, New Jersey, and at the far end of a packed bowling alley, the money is moving. A crew of bowlers — some of the best amateurs in the state — are calm, stone-faced, and smashing pins. They slip bootees on their feet to keep their soles dry. They squeeze grip sacks to keep their palms dry. No one’s really drinking; they take bowling too seriously to be drunk. After bowling a frame, they go over to a table to pick a card from a deck laid out, in cryptic fashion, along a growing array of loose bills.
I have no idea what’s happening in this game other than it’s going well for a guy known as Big Mike. Pocketing a fat stash of cash, he tells me, in his perfect Philly accent, “Bowlers like gambling.”
An imposingly tall 40-something man with gray hair cut military-neat, Mike Weinert hosts Sweep The Rack, a podcast for “hard-core bowlers.” On his podcast and in person, his knowledge of and devotion to bowling is entrancing. He waves dismissively at the other side of the bowling center, where people are bowling on “house” patterns, meaning lanes laid out with oil patterns designed to help you bowl strikes. Big Mike and his friends are bowling on more difficult “sport” patterns, meaning the kind of layouts the pros use.
“It’s Masters Sunday,” he says, using a golf metaphor. “That’s this shit right here.”
Within minutes, Big Mike and the crew move to a less joyful subject: Bowlero, the biggest bowling company in the world. Fueled by millions from private equity groups like Apollo Global Management and Atairos, Bowlero has grown rapidly. Formed in 2014, it now has more than 350 centers, including the one we’re in tonight. As the company has expanded, it has amassed massive debts, all while successfully enriching its founder and CEO.
It’s also become the target of a federal investigation into alleged ageist and racist hiring practices, with claims emerging of “beauty contest” job interviews and threats of corporate espionage and retaliation.
For the most part, Bowlero doesn’t build its own centers. Instead, it purchases existing ones and makes them over in the Bowlero style: dim lights, loud music, expensive cocktails. At Bowleros, bowling isn’t bowling. It’s “upscale entertainment.” ....
....MUCH MORE
