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Milk for Beer. They also made a big play for the housewife, taught so many to bowl that membership in the Woman's International Bowling Congress last year passed the 1,000,000 mark, is expected to increase another 250,000 this year. In many an alley the beer cooler has given way to the bottle warmer. When Cleveland's suburban Northfield Lanes opened last year, it offered housewives three weeks of free bowling, also tossed in lessons, coffee and baby sitting on the house. By following this pattern (often adding closed-circuit TV for mothers to watch their children in the nursery from the lanes), alleys have made it possible to fill once-idle morning hours with women bowlers. Explains General Manager George Paul Smith of Scioto Lanes outside Columbus, Ohio: "If we don't get the women we're through."
With housewives in the morning and noon hours, teen-agers in the afternoons, and leagues ranging from religious groups to industrial teams, bowling has become a 24-hour-a-day sport in many parts of the country. (Texas Instruments' workers start bowling at Dallas Cotton Bowling Palace at 4 a.m. after the night shift ends.) New England, the heart of smaller-sized duck-and candlepins. is giving way to the tenpin boom. Between them A.M.F. and Brunswick claim this year they will add some 25,000 new automatic pin-setting machines in bowling alleys across the nation.
Culling Competition. The expansion has some alley operators worried. With fat profits (often 13% return on investment after taxes and a ten-year amortization of invested capital) have come new alley operators to share in bowling's bonanza. In some metropolitan centers such as Chicago, Detroit and New York City, bowling alleys have been overbuilt. Los Angeles, with eight bowling centers in a 3½-mile radius, has been faced with bowling price wars. But the national average is still one lane for every 1,900 people, and bowling proprietors feel that one lane per 1,500 population is a safe ratio from the standpoint of profits.
Nevertheless, both A.M.F. and Brunswick are going abroad, where automated tenpin bowling is almost unknown. Brunswick has built commercial installations in Lebanon and Italy and signed a contract to convert J. Arthur Rank-owned movie houses into bowling alleys in England. A.M.F. this month automated the second bowling alley in Stockholm, will soon build similar facilities in Denmark, Belgium and Australia. With the expensive promotions and plush environments, A.M.F. and Brunswick hope to build bowling overseas up to the scale of the U.S.