Why does Augusta National Golf Club look so perfect? How is the merchandise shop built like a stately home? Why is a press building worth multi-millions worth having for two weeks a year?
The investment at the Masters and the golf course is vast. Each fairway and green is a carpet, you knew that already. You could eat your dinner from them. And whoever wins the Green Jacket now receives $4.2 million, and this won’t decrease in the coming years, either.
Would you like my best guess as to how the club affords all of this? Among other things, it is the merchandise shop. From Tuesday to Sunday, the stretch I have been here for, there have been thousands of patrons queuing for most minutes of the time they have in the gates, looking to grab the most exclusive and prized possessions with the Masters logo that so few golfers possess.
$270 a second is the touted figure that the merchandise shop takes. When one patron told me this as we chinwagged on the side of the 14th hole, I wasn’t the least bit surprised. I thought it might be more, if anything.
This astronomic income is not least helped by the variety of items in there. You have T-shirts, quarter-zips, hoodies, jumpers, hats, gloves, and fleeces.
But you also have the miscellaneous items – the little pieces that draw you in as you walk through the checkout, similar to the way Tesco lines up chewing gum and paracetamol at the final stage of your transaction.
There are belts, flasks, glasses, sunglasses, duffle bags, wallets and coasters, too. And the Masters gnome. You can read about the gnomes here. There are supposedly only a thousand made available a day, which means well over a thousand children will be heartbroken when their parents discover they are all gone by 9 am.
