Fans, consumers just don’t have the same “get up and go”

September 11th, 2009 / Author: admin

When Yogi Berra, Hall of Fame catcher for the New York Yankees, uttered his famous, “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded” assessment of a popular spot, it was merely an ironic twist.  These days, it may be read as an epitaph for any business — retail, entertainment or travel — that needs people to get up and go.  More than a bad economy, more than changing fashion and more than the TSA, the reason we are staying put is technology.  It is delivering on the experience without the inconvenience.

That retail space is going begging is no new story.  The 10 percent drop in air travel in the United States is also well-documented.   But when the NFL reports that the opening game of the season played by a team in the last Super Bowl is not sold out and so may be blacked out, well, that is news.

Long viewed as the most popular sport in America, the NFL has sown the seeds of its in-stadium problems by aggressively courting new technologies that make the in-home experience different to the point of betting better.  After all, in high def, with DVR pause and playback, the action is more real — and controllable — from the couch than the loge level.  In fact, this beat is continuing with the emergence of 3-D.

But more than just planting the seeds, the NFL has fertilized and watered them by making the trip to and from its stadia difficult and time-consuming, its ticket prices expensive and its arenas unruly.  If CDs and movies are better bought online, and shoes no longer need to be tried on before purchasing, then it should come as no surprise that football fans feel better bar-be-que’ing at home than tailgating in the parking lot.

Sports have become software for our domestic entertainment hardware.  The die was cast 35 years ago when Ted Turner, anxious to turn his Atlanta UHF television channel in the nation’s first satellite-delivered superstation, bought the Atlanta Braves so he could broadcast every one of their games nationwide.  It wasn’t a deal driven by the sport, but by the hardware — the television — and the advertising it could sell.

The trend will continue.  So too will NFL black-outs (a policy adopted, in the first place, to get people to go the the game).  But if site-based businesses can’t make going different enough to be better than staying home, another of Yogi’s phrases might apply, “It gets late early out there.”