technophile

We've got a bunch of guys who have nothing better to do than to show up early for their games/stay late after, so we always have a friendly-hostile "cheering section" unless we're the only game of the night. :D Goes double during the playoffs, when the asshat ref waved off both a penalty shot (defenseman covering the puck in the crease) and legitimate goal in the last 30 seconds he heard about it from the crowd for a good 5 minutes. Good times.

I dunno, I think it's a good thing. If the dad doesn't know anything about hockey, better to ask someone who does rather than do something wrong and potentially get his kid hurt. I mean, sure, they're just laces, but one of the most important factors in being able to skate in the first place is good skate fit, and laces are pretty important there. Beats the heck out of all those idiot customers who don't know anything and assume they do... ;) Edit: I mean it's a good thing to ask to be shown, not to expect them to do it for you. Asking them to do it for you is just

mostly just don't call for the puck. 70% of the time if you deserve it and are in position to do something with it you'll probably get it. Good point. The exception is the point. There are a lot of forwards out there (even ones who aren't total jerkoffs) who end up with the puck down in the corner and it's like their eyes get locked on the net, even though they're below the goal line with a D and the center blocking their passing lanes and their own D is hopping up and down at the top of the faceoff circle, wide open and screaming his lungs out for a pass. ...Not that that's ever happened to me. All the time. Or anything. ;)

I always liked the cucumber-wrapped-in-foil trick, myself. ;)

That's not necessarily a stupid question. To someone who doesn't follow all the latest gear (or who isn't an experienced hockey player), the answer is really not obvious. Especially given that you can look at $450 sneakers compared to $50 sneakers and ask the same question and the answer is "basically nothing".

Picking a curve based on a single move (like the toe drag) is probably not a good idea. You're better off just taking your usual curve and practicing a lot. Check out the drills on usahockey.com; they have some good ones.

While I think it's probably true that bad word of mouth hurts more than most people realize, that study is problematic. People often say they do, or have, or would do something completely different than they actually do in practice. They may say they'd never go there, but six months later if a good sale pops up, they may not even remember the bad story, or decide the price is worth it. That's not to say that the study is definitely useless; it may be correct, it's just impossible to tell since they relied on what people said (and people are notoriously bad at predicting what they would do, and tend to lie/misremember about what they have done) and not what they did.

I should note, that doesn't mean that the MFRs won't continue to introduce really high-end stuff and charge an arm and a leg for it; it just means that they will always have a relatively inexpensive, entry-level line. Segmenting your market is a very smart thing to do in any business; you charge more from the people who are willing to pay more (by offering them higher-end or exclusive products) while still getting money from people who aren't willing to pay much (by offering them entry-level products with fewer features, that cost you less to make). You try to encourage the lower spenders to move up the ladder, sure, but you have to have that entry level to bring in new customers. Nike and Reebok absolutely want to make their hockey products more popular, not less, especially with people who don't buy from them now, and making entry level gear more expensive is directly counter to that. (Prices will go up over time due to inflation, but if you adjust for inflation I bet you'll find that entry level gear has stayed basically the same--or possibly even gotten cheaper--over the last 30+ years.)

The rink that runs my local league has a package equipment deal -- the youth one runs $199. And you can always buy used to get cheaper than that -- the youth used market should be pretty lively, since kids grow out of things faster than they wear out. And you can get kids into roller hockey or even (for ultimate savings) floor/street hockey (which can be played with nothing more than a stick and maybe some shin/elbow pads) to make sure they'll like it/stick with it before you start dropping lots of cash on ice equipment. I'm not saying hockey isn't relatively expensive, because it is. But I can't see manufacturers intentionally pricing their product more expensively if it's only available online; it just doesn't work out economically. You always want to attract new people, since that's a much better way to grow revenue than trying to resell to your existing customers.

No comment on the rest of your post, but do you really think that hockey manufacturers are going to raise the prices and drive away their customers? Really? Because that would be the stupidest possible thing they could do. They spend millions of dollars every year on advertising intended to increase their customer base; raising prices out of the reach of most current players would be pretty incredibly stupid. Neither Nike nor Reebok -- both of whom are very large corporations and didn't get that way by being idiotic -- is likely to do that. All that would happen in that case is that some other company would see an opportunity to take over the market by selling less expensive gear (direct or otherwise), and the other manufacturers would either have to accept niche status (like Apple) or bring their prices back down to sane levels. That's simple economics. That said, I do like local hockey shops better than online. Things like pants and shin guards are hard to fit online, so unless you're buying exact replacements it's a lot riskier than heading into a store and trying them on there.

Is that better, or worse, than not selling the stick (and any other purchases that customer makes later on) because you were an ass to a customer "only" spending $100?

I can't speak for the guys who actually work at LHS, but from what I've heard they like to do it on their own schedule, so they can take several pairs and just do them all at once rather than firing up the sharpener 5 times a day for one pair each time. I always drop my skates off a couple of days before I need them, but then I only skate 1-2 times a week; if I were skating every day obviously I couldn't do that.