Masters shop tills to ring up record sales

tHe biggest one-location merchandising operation in sport made its debut in augusta yesterday with the opening of a club shop likely to break all commercial records during the Masters.

augusta have built, in 255 days, a giant state-ofthe-art golf shop that will enable them to fully cash in on their strategy of only selling Mastersbranded products at the venue.

the Masters reveal very little of their finances. even the winner’s prize for this week’s tournament — likely to be more than $2million (£1.4m) for the first time — is not made public until the eve of the final round. So it can only be an estimate what the 64 cash registers in the shop will ring up over seven days of non-stop selling.

However, one pointer came from augusta’s own promotional video of its golf shop, which says it is selling 125 varieties of hat and one is sold every second. that works out during the store’s 8am-7pm opening hours during Masters week at a mind-boggling $7.2m (£5.1m) worth of sales in $26 (£18.50) hats alone.

the final merchandise sales total will be kept under wraps by the secretive private members club. But $60m (£43m) over just one week in one store is a conservative guess and nowhere else on planet sport can match that. ian PoUlter’S thrilling play- off win in the Houston open to gain the last spot in the Masters field means he will not be in the Sky broadcasting booth as had been expected.

Sky are not expected to bring in another current player to replace Poulter, relying mainly on Butch Harmon and Paul McGinley to be their pundits for the tournament.

lWIMBLEDON

communications chief Alex Willis is coming to Augusta this week especially to see what the All England Club can learn from the £45m Masters media centre that opened for the first time in 2017 and is the best facility of its kind in the sporting world. The only advantage Wimbledon’s press room has over its Augusta counterpart is its position by Centre Court. And Wimbledon’s strawberries and cream are no match for the Augusta food — so good that USA Today asked players to reveal their go-to meal in the clubhouse. Trevor Immelman said: ‘Egg salad sandwich. They must have the best chickens in the world.’