I will support Tony in a few ways with facts. My invoice prices are up x%, I now have to pay around 7-10% on currency and bank fees each invoice. I have to pay 25% customs now on most of my orders. It doesn't matter WHAT the wholesale cost was or how much it went up, my cost of goods is what my retail prices were... no way to stay in business that way without raising prices. I am not BTY, whose hoards of buyers blindly buy expensive lie little sheep, like it, and be the fanboy on the internetz.
Manufacturers are passing on costs to wholesalers, who pass on costs to retailers, who now must pass on costs or stop operations. I am tempted to stop operations myself, I still help people, but it is no longer easy. No one in USA wants to pay $65 usd for a jersey, which is now my cost, no matter how damn good they look and it costs $20+ to letter them... no one wants that, so if I buy inventory, I may be stuck with it... stuck like chuck. you could go big, but in USA, you end up going broke. The USA market can realistically only have two outfits large enough to operate on large scale and actually hire employees and make container sized orders. Trying to go big in that situation is a waste of money.
We could extend that conversation to TT gyms in USA. In my city of Sacramento, USA, a 3 Million population area, there are ZERO full time conventional TT clubs. There are very good reasons for this. It is too expensive to lease an operate a space suitable in excess of the income from the number of members paying and kids taking lessons.
A suitable spot is 15,000 sq ft which in a bad part of the city is around 1USD per sq ft per month, plus utilities run 5-10k usd/mo. That is not considering the initial investment of outfitting the floor and lights and paint and minor improvements to make it playable... which would be a loan of 200k going skimpy. That means TT club owner has overhead of $25,000 usd a MONTH that is BEFORE any income. People here are NOT WILLING to pay more than $60 a month to play unlimited, or they do not show up. You could bring in high level coach and give him 1/2 the coaching fees (40usd for coach, 40usd for owner). You would need 200 members paying 60 usd/mo (12k) and 75 kids taking 1 lesson a week (12k) just to break even every month on the core overhead, which are not all the expenses. The clubs here before who tried to make it barely reached 100 members. The market here is not able to support the huge expenses it takes to run a TT club. That is why owners have tried and FAILED and lost money.
The only way a club survives is that the owner is a rich uncle with multiple properties making money and can absorb a $100,000 -$200,000 loss per year to offset some tax liability from his other profitable operations. That is the only way. Sacramento was fortunate to have such a person who was ambitious and opened up a huge club, got only 100 members, had only 30-50 players taking lessons, so he was losing a minimum of $150,000 a year, likely more, since he spent what looked like $500,000 or more initially refurbishing and equipping the gym. he was totally OK with losing that kind of money, then the county govt get real oppressive during the early months of Covid times and TOLD him and ORDERED him HOW to run his business, and placed restrictions on operations that guaranteed a $40,000 per month loss and frequently visited and harassed him. Dude had enough and shut down the club permanently.
THAT is the situation in USA in nearly every urban area. (you try to run a club in the country, you will not even get 20 people in the club, despite advertisements for free beer and live cheerleaders) Unless owner can absorb huge loss per month per year, there is zero chance any kind of proper TT club in majority of urban areas can be viable. The only ones staying in operation long have a special market where there are enough foreign kids taking lessons (foreign parents sending them) to make it work.
