Top Golf coming to Ridgeland
- Thread starter ronpolk
- Start date
Great for the metro. But I have to wonder if ANYONE who votes in the City of Jackson ever wakes up and thinks, "We could have had this (and probably SHOULD have this) if I would just quit voting in mayors whose mottos are the typical small-time selfish "take take take take"."
There are problems in Jackson, Mississippi? We should have a really long thread about them.
If folks would quit voting the way you do, they might could have gotten the baseball stadium, TopGolf, etc., maybe even one day a new arena......despite the problems.
We went from no golf drinking places to 2 in the matter of 3 days.
That new state flag is strong, brothers
The pessimist in me thinks top golf announced only to scare the golf suites place and in reality neither will be built
Can't imagine this area supporting both long term. And Top Golf has much better brand name awareness
I agree that I doubt the area could support both, especially when the proposed locations are probably only about 5 miles from each other. For both to work, I think one should consider rankin county. The only place I know that has both golf suits and top golf is Baton Rouge. I’m not sure how both do but I know Baton Rouge has a much bigger metro population than Jackson.
GolfSuites should go to Flowood. Having both a couple of miles apart isn't going to work. What the hell??? Madison is not big and Madison County is only like 120k people entirely.
Some top golf competitor announced they were coming to my town a few months ago. Top golf then announced a few weeks ago that it's also coming to town and is building about 1 mile from the competitor.
Odd.
Odd.
I'm hoping that it isn't just a move by TopGolf to protect the territory by threatening expansion into the area. I could see GolfSuites scared off and us getting neither for a long time. I suppose it is also possible that both company's market research led them here independently and GolfSuites beat them to the press release. I didn't know there was a GolfSuites until they announced the Madison location. In a good economy, both might be successful. In a bad economy, the TopGolf location and proximity to more people will be the demise of the other.
The golf suites location to me is based on likely being able to get cheaper land. I think they are going on galleria parkway, which I’m sure Madison county is begging for something to locate there. The proposed top golf location is the best in the metro area in my opinion. Plenty of residential traffic and tons of businesses around that would entertain clients.
McDonalds would go do car counts and a lot of research before building a new restaurant. Wendy's would just wait until McDonalds built and then follow suit. Then you would see three to five different fast foods all in same location as McDonalds. I don't think it works that way any more but this could be wants going on with this.
I think it's a little weird that every surrounding state already has at least one TopGolf, and now they are coming into the Jackson market at the same time as GolfSuites, as if the place was just discovered. Lol
There is a location by Snowden Grove Park in DeSoto county that just screams for one of these. All that land behind the Kroger would put it right in the middle of the entertainment district. Where they are planning on putting it off of Winchester and Germantown is a dump.
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They heard that Madison had a lot swingers and they thought that meant that Madisonites REALLY liked to play golf a lot
I read a similar story about Walgreens/CVS back in the day. Seems like CVS bought opposite corners from Walgreens for a while.
Yep, that Renaissance location would kill off the Madison Golf Suites for sure. Top Golf would take 90% of the customers from Rankin, Jackson, Clinton, plus a good portion of Madison since they are the ‘name brand’. I don’t know about most people, but I never go up to Madison if what I need is in Rankin County or Ridgeland.
Agree. With the amount of traffic and surrounding population of east Lakeland/Flowood and the airport being over there, it makes me wonder if they know what they're doing. GolfSuites is ahead of TopGolf on opening schedule. This is going to be an expensive disaster for somebody.
I’ve been hearing about TopGolf coming for months, maybe close to a year. Could have just been speculation or ideas, but this isn’t very new.
I don’t know if it can support both but I’ve never been to a top golf that wasn’t full with a waiting list including some weekday visits.
I think people will go to whichever is convenient to them assuming the product is relatively similar.
I think people will go to whichever is convenient to them assuming the product is relatively similar.
This is a fascinating business development. I have never seen a business torpedo it's own customer like this... Golfsuites runs off Toptracer, which is owned by TopGolf. Toptracer tracks the ball flight, spin, speed etc instead of the chipped ball method used by TopGolf.
Golf suites is out here trying to build places to use Toptracer and TopGolf OG is like hell naw.... I guarantee you there is a salesman for Toptracer that is getting his *** chewed by Golfsuites and is ready to go beat the **** out of someone at TopGolf over this.
Anyhow. I lived about 3 miles from the 2nd US TopGolf when it opened in the 07ish I believe. They damn near went out of business those first few years until outside investment saved them. It really sucked honestly. That facility was a major screw up. They built the thing 250 yards long so to get credit for drive points you had to hit it 250, which is a challenge for most golfers using a real ball, much less the general public. Add in the horrible distance and flight you get from the TG ball and nobody was getting it there unless you put a lot of draw roll.
The food was pretty bland and it was expensive. Definitely got better after 2009 or so. But it became nothing but a party hang out for 20 something's uptown yuppies. When I moved to the suburbs from Dallas in 18' I had 2 new TopGolfs within 10 miles. I never went to either one before I moved a couple of years ago. All in, I have been maybe 5 times since 2010 and it was to entertain out of town guests or clients.
The more serious I became about golf, the less I became interested in TopGolf. The ball flight is bad, nearly 2 clubs shorter idustance in my opinion. It's very distracting to try to hit a ball with drunk idiots everywhere yelling and shanks whizzing by from 6 bays over.
Golfsuites would be a little more intriguing because you at least hit real balls and get some ball flight data, which can help with your actual golf game. There are some other ones like Drive Shack in Fla that use actual trackman launch monitors that should give you all the data from the ball and club. That would be cool for us more serious golfers
Anyhow, I don't think both would make it in Jackson. I always thought per capita, MS had a lot of golfers that took it serious and we're good players compared to Dallas. I know MS has a much lower population of suburban D-bags that are the true lifeblood of TopGolf, out there drinking weak margaritas and Fireball shots before falling into the net from the second deck. (Make no mistake, this is how TopGolf makes its money.) Everyone will enjoy it for the first couple of years, but it honestly gets old from my experience. Once the novelty wears off with golfers, it would be hard to keep one of the two busy I am guessing.
Golf suites is out here trying to build places to use Toptracer and TopGolf OG is like hell naw.... I guarantee you there is a salesman for Toptracer that is getting his *** chewed by Golfsuites and is ready to go beat the **** out of someone at TopGolf over this.
Anyhow. I lived about 3 miles from the 2nd US TopGolf when it opened in the 07ish I believe. They damn near went out of business those first few years until outside investment saved them. It really sucked honestly. That facility was a major screw up. They built the thing 250 yards long so to get credit for drive points you had to hit it 250, which is a challenge for most golfers using a real ball, much less the general public. Add in the horrible distance and flight you get from the TG ball and nobody was getting it there unless you put a lot of draw roll.
The food was pretty bland and it was expensive. Definitely got better after 2009 or so. But it became nothing but a party hang out for 20 something's uptown yuppies. When I moved to the suburbs from Dallas in 18' I had 2 new TopGolfs within 10 miles. I never went to either one before I moved a couple of years ago. All in, I have been maybe 5 times since 2010 and it was to entertain out of town guests or clients.
The more serious I became about golf, the less I became interested in TopGolf. The ball flight is bad, nearly 2 clubs shorter idustance in my opinion. It's very distracting to try to hit a ball with drunk idiots everywhere yelling and shanks whizzing by from 6 bays over.
Golfsuites would be a little more intriguing because you at least hit real balls and get some ball flight data, which can help with your actual golf game. There are some other ones like Drive Shack in Fla that use actual trackman launch monitors that should give you all the data from the ball and club. That would be cool for us more serious golfers
Anyhow, I don't think both would make it in Jackson. I always thought per capita, MS had a lot of golfers that took it serious and we're good players compared to Dallas. I know MS has a much lower population of suburban D-bags that are the true lifeblood of TopGolf, out there drinking weak margaritas and Fireball shots before falling into the net from the second deck. (Make no mistake, this is how TopGolf makes its money.) Everyone will enjoy it for the first couple of years, but it honestly gets old from my experience. Once the novelty wears off with golfers, it would be hard to keep one of the two busy I am guessing.
This is incredibly odd. Am I reading this right? Why would TG own Toptracer and sell it to competitors, but use something totally different at their own facilities?
You are reading it correctly. TopGolf Entertainment Group or TEG has several brands, TopGolf Venues and TopTracer are the ones we are talking about here.
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https://topgolfentertainmentgroup.com/about/our-brands/#toptracer
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https://www.golfsuites.com/fun-play/
Now I have worked for a big dumb company before where we had multiple divisions that ran into various channel conflicts, but this is blatant ******** if the reports in the thread are true that this happened in other markets and now Jackson.
On a side note, about a year after I started with the previously mentioned big dumb company we lost a Sherman Antitrust Case for nearly $100 million. I would have to think lawsuits are coming if TG can't prove an absolute Chinese firewall between it's venue business and TopTracer business that Golfsuites is a customer of... 17 TopGolf is my current take.
I guess I was more specifically curious about why TopGolf uses a different (inferior?) ball tracking software than TopTracer when they obviously have the option not to do so? I do know that whatever they use at their standard TG facilities absolutely sucks. It never fails that me or someone else in my group will be on….lets just call it Ball 9….place the ball on the tee, come to address and line up, and then hit back net with the driver. Look up on the screen….and still on Ball 9. Tracker software never saw it. This seems to happen 2-3 times per visit for my group. I know I’m not the only one.
Secondly, it seems like there is ample opportunity to prevent a copycat business from ever popping up anywhere if they own that platform. It would be extremely easy to build terms of use language into the sales contract for Toptracer to where it essentially can’t be used at anything remotely resembling a TopGolf establishment (no more than X number of simultaneous users per license agreement, etc.). So they could have guaranteed they would never be in this predicament on the front end.
Just an odd business arrangement overall.
ETA: Reading more about # of locations for Top Golf and Golf Suites. TopGolf has maybe 75-80 locations around the world with about 5-10 more in the “Coming Soon” category. Golf Suites has literally 3 total locations (Tulsa, Lubbock, Baton Rouge), and 2 of those were just built. Also looking at the Toptracer home page, and it appears to be an actual game improvement tracking application that wasn’t ever intended to be used at a facility like GolfSuites or TopGolf….like ever. I’m thinking that GolfSuites purchased Toptracer under the guise of using it under a much smaller operation….probably targeted at more serious golfers in more of a standard driving range setting. They are now using said application to essentially build multiple copycat businesses to TopGolf.
Seems to me that something in the sales / terms of use language in the Toptracer contract was not robust enough to protect TGE via some form of non-compete. Or maybe it was, and now TGE is about to sue the **** out of GolfSuites. In any case, I think we all know who is going to come out on top of this. If TopGolf is already effectively chasing GS out of potential markets that aren’t even on their immediate radar, I don’t see their future expansion prospects will be looking too rosy.
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