The Bowling Ball SCAM... How long do bowling balls really last?

Bowlers are being scammed when it comes to buying new bowling balls I think it's safe to say we've all been successfully tricked the balls themselves are pretty expensive and when you add in drilling will easily set you back a couple of hundred a piece not only do we seem to need to buy five or six bowling balls for a decent tournament set which adds up to thousands of dollars there's another major problem to contend with and that's that these reactive vulnerables simply do not last and that is the big scam these bowling balls are simply not built to last and you'll find yourself having to replace them before long let me show you a picture that will break the heart of all Bowlers out there yes it's the dreaded cracked bowling ball this seems to have happened to most Boulders at some point in their lives now I know some will say that it's all down to how you store the bowling balls and not to keep them in extreme temperatures but to be honest I think we've had bowling balls crack even when they've been kept in should we say like a neutral environment but whatever the reason for a barnable cracking like this to me it's simply unacceptable because the question I would raise is why as consumers should we accept this I've read stories online of this happening to fairly new vulnerables for no apparent reason at all and I guess you wouldn't mind it so much if these bowling balls were only fifty dollars but when you're spending hundreds and hundreds you certainly have certain expectations that these balls should last for at least a reasonable period of time but if we just leave the the cracking aside they just don't seem to last that long anymore these new reactive balls I mean they just soak up the oil like a sponge and before long they just start to really lose their reaction before becoming dead now you can still obviously use these bowling balls and you can still have some success but in terms of the performance you just notice a significant dip in performance of the reaction of a ball after a very short period of time when you look online there's people seem to say that they last for around 300 games but that doesn't really seem like that long to be honest I think you can probably get a little bit more use out of it than that but um even so a year or so of heavy use and I'm talking about leagues and tournaments and the Bulls just seem to lose that reaction dramatically urethane's I I would argue that Dew tend to last longer however the PBA have recently banned the use of any urethane ball that is older than six months now the PBA say that it's because back in August 2022 there were changes that were made to the hardness of urethane balls that were being manufactured from that point on they also claimed the hardness of urethane changes over time and they want to prevent this um well while this certainly could be true the very cynical part of me wonders if this just isn't another way to encourage Bowlers to keep spending money on more bowling balls if you want to play PBA events and you're a big urethane user and you do not have a sponsorship deal you're going to have to keep buying new urethane balls at least every six months and how long before this rule is expanded and it becomes a rule for let's say sanctioned USBC tournaments then it's starts to spread to sanction leagues and suddenly the average League bowler and the average tournament bowler is forced to keep buying new urethanes every six months as well as new reactives to replace the previous ones that they can no longer realistically use people might say this is unlikely and it will never spread outside of the PBA but nothing would surprise me and I really think that it won't be too long before this urethane rule starts to make its way into other non-pba events but this scam isn't just about bowling balls it's actually prevalent in all of our products that we use in our lives now it just feels like you know you go back 20 years and things just seem to last a lot longer household appliances like washing machines fridges ovens Etc could easily seem to last 15 to 20 years with no issues but now this does not seem to be the case you can buy a new TV for instance and within three years or so it just seems to start to develop some thought that either needs repairing or you might even end up replacing it completely I actually noticed this most with electronics and specifically mobile phones the battery on a mobile phone it just does not last anymore it seems like every new phone that I've bought in the last five or six years follows a very similar pattern it seems to work perfectly for the first year and then suddenly you start to see a significant decline in the battery life yet you keep charging it up more and more often and it just runs out so quickly and it's like after a year and a half two years the battery just seems to be like almost dead so then you have a choice to make is do you send it off for repair or do you just go ahead and buy a replacement product or the new latest phone and the other issue is a lot of these in terms of electronics it's becoming more and more difficult to fix these things yourself I think on a lot of new phones you can't even remove the battery now so in in the old days you know 10 15 20 years ago you could just take the back the back off uh put a new battery in but in the new phones for a while that they've kind of stopped that and and now obviously if you have an issue you have to send it off for a for repair and these repairs obviously they're not cheap it's a lot more expensive than it would be to just buy a replacement battery and do it yourself no time you add in the costs of the repair and the wait time a lot of the times it's just far easier just to go ahead and buy a new phone now just back to bowling for a moment because there does seem to be this notion now that Bowlers need to keep buying more and more Bulls because that's what the pros are doing a pro can go ahead and drill a new set of balls for each tournament if they wanted and a lot of them that's exactly what they do but they obviously can do this because they're sponsored and they either get the balls for free or if not for a very low cost so if you haven't got a sponsor it's very unlikely you're going to be able to afford to fund this yourself here's a good indication of just how many bowling balls the pros tend to use on the tour this was posted by PBA Pro Mr 100 that is Tom Doherty on his Facebook page this is the number of balls that he's had drilled since the 1st of January this year I had a quick rough count and it looks like there's around 50 balls in this photo all of these balls in the space of four months so clearly unless you have a sponsor the average bowler would never be able to drill up this many balls in such a short period of time so is this one big conspiracy that's been cooked up by these companies that produce the products we use throughout our lives well it certainly does feel that way because not only are products not lasting very long at all as I mentioned earlier these manufacturers seem to have made it more difficult to prepare these items yourself certainly when you're talking about like Electronics but I don't think this is just my imagination because I've heard people say very similar things about random products uh and a number of videos that I've posted lately people have commented saying that they're buying these bowling balls but they just don't seem to be lasting very long so it does seem to be a genuine problem and a concern for a lot of dollars out there and I guess the big question is how do we change this well quite simply you just need to vote with your feet so to speak and if you're unhappy with the quality of any product that you buy well you simply stop buying that product and you find an alternative although in Bowling it's slightly trickier as the market is dominated by a handful of companies but that doesn't mean to say that we as Bowlers can't express our feelings about their products for example if everyone decided they were fed up of using urethane and started to only use reactive balls but eventually urethane balls would stop being manufactured in such large quantities at least and bull companies would stop releasing new urethane bottles if there was no market for them so the people do have the power as they say and ultimately helped to dictate the products that are being developed based on their buying habits but listen no bowling ball that you buy is of course ever going to last forever and I think that it's unrealistic to think that you're going to buy a new ball and that ball is going to last you 10 years that that's not what I'm saying I'm just saying that I think that when you're paying hundreds and hundreds um for a product you need to feel like you've got something out of it right you you've got a genuine amount of use and the reason I made this video as I mentioned earlier was just because the people I've spoken to the comments I've seen this does seem to be a big concern that a lot of Bowlers are raising and they're saying well hang on a minute these balls aren't lasting very long another thing that annoyed people is the change in the urethane rule because again that is forcing people essentially to buy new balls every six months if you want to be a pro and you want to use urethane now you've got no choice but to buy urethane balls at uh basically every six months but I think the main reason this has probably started to come to light a bit more now is that money is of course very tight for a lot of people and it has been for the last few months I think it's caused a lot of people to look at what they're spending their spending habits the things that they're buying the things they need the things they don't and when you become conscious of that when things become tight I think that's when you start to question and you start to say right well do I really need that fifth uh Starbucks coffee this week that new pen that I bought well it's only lasting me one day that that product's no good I can't afford to buy that anymore right I'm Gonna Save myself x amount per week and then eventually people go right well my hobbies whether you're a bowler a golfer it doesn't matter it would be the same principle with a golf club you buy a new top of the range I don't know I'm not a golfer a top of the range 99 or whatever um and within six months it doesn't work right it just snaps and breaks it in half do you think the golfers are going to accept that well no of course they're not so it's the same principle and when money is tight and people can't always afford to spend hundreds on a new bowling ball regularly it then becomes a priority for them that they're getting a decent return on their investment and just overall receiving a good high quality product so that brings us to a close for today's uh little discussion on bowling balls I would be really interested to hear all of your thoughts on this so please do leave a comment in the comment section below do you agree with this notion that a lot of Bowlers are feeling that the Bulls just aren't lasting as long now you know especially the high-end reactive balls or perhaps you disagree perhaps you feel that actually the balls are lasting for a long enough period of time let me know your thoughts and as always if you have enjoyed this video I would really appreciate it if you could like And subscribe to the channel thank you bowling fans and see you all next time

Channel: The Right Lane

Views: 97,103

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Id: gwsRi3FkZ9s

Length: 12min 21sec (741 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 26 2023