The New Worker Billed by the Game

A machine maker found its best business in the back of a bowling alley in 1952. It filed for bankruptcy in 2001, and again in 2012.

Every Tuesday night, your father carried the same bag to the same car.

The ball inside had his initials engraved under the finger holes. The shoes were his own, which meant he was serious.

The building smelled of floor wax, cigarette smoke and french fries. Two dozen lanes ran side by side under long fluorescent lights.

The sound came in waves.

A ball rolling, a crash, a pause, then a slow mechanical clatter from somewhere behind the pins.

Nobody went back there.

A sweep bar dropped. The fallen pins vanished.

A fresh rack of ten came down in a perfect triangle, as if the lane had set the table for the next guest.

On the panel above the pins, the one that hid the machinery, were three letters.

AMF.

American Machine & Foundry was founded in 1900 in Brooklyn, New York, to build machinery for the tobacco industry. It came to bowling through a patent it bought around 1940.

Before the machine, pins were set by hand. Pinboys, usually teenagers, crouched in a pit at the end of each lane, dodged flying wood and earned about five to ten cents a game.

The company showed a two-ton prototype at a bowling tournament in Buffalo in 1946. A rebuilt version went into production in 1952.

It did not sell the machine to alley owners. It leased it, for a fee of about 12 cents per game.

That was the arrangement hiding in the pit. The proprietor was not buying equipment. He was replacing a wage with a meter.

The boy in the pit went home for good. The money kept moving, now to a company with a factory and a stock ticker.

The company earned nothing when a lane sat empty. It earned on every game rolled, on every lane it served, every night of the week.

The math favored the meter. A machine never missed a shift, never got hit by a pin and never quit for a summer job.

It also worked faster. More games per lane meant more revenue for the proprietor and more fees for the machine’s owner.

League nights kept the machines busy.

By 1958, the company had leased 40,000 pinspotters. By 1960, an estimated 90 percent of American lanes had automatic pinsetters.

The structure was elegant. The proprietor carried the building, the mortgage and the staff. The machine maker carried a meter.

After several changes of ownership, a group led by Goldman Sachs bought the bowling business in 1996 for roughly $1.4 billion.

The new owners went the other way. They borrowed heavily and bought bowling centers by the hundreds. By 1999, the company operated 421 of them in the United States.

The old model had collected on every game without owning a single roof. The new one owned the roofs, the parking lots, the payroll and the heating bills.

That worked only if the lanes stayed full on weeknights. Leagues were what kept them full.

Then the leagues thinned. Membership in the three largest league organizations fell from more than 4.1 million in 1998 to about 2.6 million a decade later, a drop of 36 percent.

Fewer people could promise a whole winter of Tuesdays.

The meter had never cared who bowled. The building did.

By 2000, the company carried more than $1 billion in debt and had been delisted from the New York Stock Exchange.

It filed for Chapter 11 in April 2001, having acquired 260 additional centers it had struggled to manage.

It emerged, changed owners again and, in 2004, sold 186 of its centers to a real estate lender and leased them back.

The company that once collected rent on machines was now paying rent on buildings.

In November 2012, it filed again, with 262 centers left in the United States. In 2013, it merged with the operator of Bowlmor Lanes, and the combined company later took the name Lucky Strike Entertainment.

The pinboy job did not survive. The arrangement that replaced it did.

Equipment makers still price this way.

Copiers are billed by the page, card readers by the swipe, software by the seat.

The customer does not buy a machine. The customer rents a pair of hands that never calls in sick.

The boy in the pit was replaced.

His pay was not.