Bowling bigwigs b threw us into the gutter F
Out with old, in with young & hip, ex-staffers say
THEY proved that hipsters are game for anything — as long as you make the hangout cool enough. Starting in Manhattan in the late 1990s, the bowling company Bowlmor, with a new kingpin at its helm, began taking over rundown alleys and turning them into trendy hot spots, wooing 20- and 30-somethings with the promise of quirky, boozefilled fun.
No more middle-aged bowlers with beer guts and tacky shirts.
Beautiful people now regularly fill Bowlmor alleys. First Lady Melania Trump took her son, Barron, and stepdaughter Tiffany to the lanes at Chelsea Piers this month with 30 Secret Service agents in tow.
But the push to transform the bowling joints from haggard to hip had an ugly side, ex-workers told The Post.
In its bid to make strikes and spares cool again, the largest recreationalbowling company in the world threw out its aging “Average Joe” staff for “trendy, attractive” newcomers — even hosting “beauty contests” on Skype to hire the “hippest” candidates, ex-employees say.
Bowlmor AMF — with locations across the country, including in Times Square and the Chelsea Piers site — is now facing more than 50 discrimination complaints filed with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Ten of the plaintiffs are from New York, according to their lawyer, Daniel Dowe.
“These people can’t get away with what they’ve done,’’ insisted former Bowlmor manager Miguel Martinez, 59, referring to company officials.
“You can’t treat people this way,’’ he said. “We’re human beings, we’re not cattle.”
BOWLMOR has a long history in New York City.
It began in Manhattan in 1938, opening an alley on University Place in Greenwich Village.
But while the spot lured top bowlers for decades, by the early 1990s, it was languishing — badly.
Enter Tom Shannon. In 1994, the Darden Business School grad visited the dilapidated alley for a birthday party. Looking past the smokestained walls and shady neighborhood regulars, he saw dollar signs on every scratched-up red and white pin.
Shannon and a team of investors bought the alley for $2 million in 1997 and began transforming the greasy interior into a gleaming nighttime gathering spot.
He eventually went national with his business plan, buying up tired alleys and breathing lucrative new life into them by installing flat-screen TVs, glow-in-the-dark lanes and upscale design elements.
In 2010, Bowlmor Times Square opened in the former New York Times headquarters on West 43rd Street.
When competitor AMF Bowling Worldwide filed for bankruptcy in 2012, Shannon saw another business opportunity.
In July 2013, Bowlmor Lanes took over AMF and began transforming many of its shabby bowling centers much the same way, wooing millennials with night bowling, DJs and eclectic food and cocktails.
But there were casualties along the
way. Between 2013 and 2015, the company fired 287 managers from its 351 bowling centers, gutting the business from the inside out. Higher-ups replaced the outgoing managers with younger, more attractive talent who were given “comparable, if not higher” salaries, ex-workers say.
“We started terminating people for no reason at all,” said Kelly Shannon, a former HR manager who oversaw new managerial hires in the northeast region and is now an EEOC plaintiff.
The ex-manager, no relation to Tom Shannon, said Bowlmor asked her to start creating profiles for the managers in her region, which included a picture and a short biography.
“If [higher-ups] went to a center and didn’t like the way the general manager looked . . . whether it be age or appearance, they came up with some way to terminate them,’’ Kelly Shannon told The Post.
“We were told a lot to give the excuse that ‘we were going in a different direction.’ ”
She said there was no documentation of bad performances by those who were booted, “just a visit from a higher-up a few weeks before the firing.”
She said Tom Shannon began requesting Skype-interviews with potential candidates before they were hired. But he wouldn’t ask standard interview questions and kept the sessions extremely short.
“There wasn’t any depth to the interviews, she said. “He wanted to Skype interview to see if this person’s young or attractive.”
Bowlmor AMF told The Post in a statement that the company “does not discriminate on the basis of age or in any other fashion.
“The company will vigorously defend any claims and believes that it will prevail,” it said.
MIGUEL Martinez claims he was one of the company’s targets. The married dad got his first job in bowling at 17 in The Bronx and worked in centers across the tristate area for the next 40 years.
He was hired as a general manager at the Rip Van Winkle Lanes in Norwalk, Conn., an AMF center, and after almost a decade of working there, he was fired “out of nowhere,” he told The Post.
“I’m 100 percent sure it was because of my appearance,” said Martinez, who weighed about 450 pounds when he was fired in August 2013 and has since filed a complaint with the EEOC.
“It’s because I’m overweight, I’m older, and I don’t fit the Bowlmor vision of what they’re looking for,” he claims.
ORMER Bowlmor manager Adam Csernay, 54, believes that he was fired because of his refusal to terminate an older employee.
Csernay, who has an EEOC complaint pending, worked as an assistant manager at the Chelsea Piers lanes for three years and was promoted to general manager at Bowlmor AMF’s 34th Avenue Lanes, now Bowlero Queens, in 2012.
He came to New York in 1988 as a political refugee from Communist Hungary, and said he enjoyed working in the bowling industry until Bowlmor came to town.
He recalled a day in late 2013, shortly after Bowlmor took over, when the regional vice president, Justin Hake, and the chief operations officer, Joshua Silverstein, came to visit his center.
“We were standing by the snack bar talking about what we were going to do to renovate the cen-ter, and Justin Hake says to me, ‘You know, there is something wrong with this picture.’ ”
Csernay said he replied, “What do you mean, what picture?”
Hake, who was district manager at the time, allegedly pointed to an older gentleman who ran the front desk.
“He’s too old to be here,” Hake said, according to Csernay.
Csernay told the higher-up he didn’t understand.
“Why would I fire him? He’s an older gentleman, yes, but knows every league bowler in New York.’’
“He just has to go,” Hake allegedly replied. I don’t want to see him at the front desk, he’s too old.”
Csernay was let go in the spring of 2014.
“I would work 120 hours a week, I put my heart into this thing,’’ he said. “In the end, it didn’t matter.”