Return To Main Blog Page Season Comes to a Close at Klees Sat Oct 25, 2008 at 9:22 AM
The 2008 golf season is winding down in a swirl of exceptional fall color and financial gloom. The cacophony of the elections is barely matched by the buzz about the Dow Jones decline and what that might mean in the year ahead.

As Klees Golf Shop prepares to close for three weeks I find myself in the usual state of panic this time of year. How will we pay the bills? Will the holiday sales be any good? Can we keep inventory at a minimum and still have what people want right now?

Necessity is the mother of invention and inventiveness is crucial to survival. Charlie’s grandmother sold baseball gear, magazines and radios during the depression. Charlie’s dad juggled inventory, convincing customers that what was on the shelves was what they wanted. We have eBay and the cyberspace of customers, many of whom can still buy cheaper in America.

Klees Golf Shop produced and mailed catalogs in the 1930s to attract customers from outside the area. Charlie introduced newspaper and Yellow Pages advertising in the 1970s and maintained a schedule of print promotions that reached the whole Southside region.

Getting golfers to our website is a bigger challenge because cyberspace is so vast and so impersonal. Mastering the complexities of web design, e-tail shopping and search engine optimization in my home office is like mastering mechanical physics with a text book in my garage. What I know is not enough and it’s time to be inventive.

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