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Want to set up a climbing gym in Melbourne? 18-Aug-2009 At 10:35:32 PM devlin66

Message

On 18/08/2009 One Day Hero wrote:
>Serious failure to understand economics here. Regardless of how hot and
>tiring the work is, if the gym paid $100/hr for routesetting there would
>be a queue of good climbers lining up to set the best routes ever. If the
>management can't afford to pay $100/hr, they can't afford to have good
>routes so the routes will be shit.....everything can be solved if you throw
>enough money at it. The key to the other gyms having better routes is that
>they've found a way to get them for less than $100/hr, hence they are better
>businessmen

Not necessarily. Being a shit hot climber does not mean you can set good routes. It takes time and a fair amount of trial and error before one gets to understand the nuances of route setting. It's very rare that a person can walk in off the street and consistently set good routes that would be worth paying 100/hr for. Most of the gyms in Australia use the same few people to set the routes and most of those guys/gals do it as part time job from either running the gym or another profession entirely. In the US and Europe a lot of the bigger gyms have a full time head route setter and team of regular route setters. They have workshops and train people properly to do the job.

As stated before the gym is a business and for the most part is going to cater for the major part of their income. For 99% of gyms it's the school and rec groups that come in. It's their bread and butter. Some more than others. For those gyms that rely solely on the groups to keep them going they aren't going to spend lots of money on resetting routes when it isn't going to add any bucks in the till. Personally I think if they tried to capture some of the after hours crowd ie. mostly serious climbers, by having a regular setting policy they would in the end find that they would increase their numbers and the money spent would be worthwhile.