Kirkland (Costco) Premium Golf Ball

[drmevo]

8 minutes ago, newtogolf said:

It was already posted in this thread on the first page.

 

Whoops, I missed that - thanks. 

Looks like it must be the Quattro model? 

http://www.nassaugolf.co.uk/golf-balls/nassau-quattro/ 

 

[newtogolf]

5 minutes ago, drmevo said:

Whoops, I missed that - thanks. 

Looks like it must be the Quattro model? 

http://www.nassaugolf.co.uk/golf-balls/nassau-quattro/ 

 

Yes but I'd guess there are other manufacturers that relabel the golf balls from Nassau as well.  Most people didn't know that Bridgestone manufactured the golf balls for Nike in accordance with Nike specifications.  

[iacas]

1 hour ago, newtogolf said:

You're guessing as well

I've never said otherwise, but without getting into the list of reasons why, I don't think I'm guessing as much as you are.

As I've pointed out, no other known good golf ball comes close to the $15/dozen pricing, including other big-name and smaller-name companies that don't have the "sponsorship" or advertising payroll Titleist has. Bridgestone isn't selling their top-tier balls for under $27/dozen. Callaway isn't. Even the Top-Flite Gamer Tour is $27.99 on Amazon Prime. Snell, KickX, Vice…

I'd still be willing to wager a couple of things:

• That Costco's balls are measurably/noticeably lower quality/performance than any of the Tier-A balls (Titleist, Bridgestone, Callaway, etc.) and the Tier-B balls (Snell, KickX, Vice?). I just think it's highly unlikely that they're achieving the quality, QC, etc. that even the Tier-B teams can achieve.
• That Titleist's "sponsorship" and advertising cost doesn't make up even the majority of the $30 difference between Pro V1 and Kirkland.

1 hour ago, newtogolf said:

I'm not guessing that Titleist pays substantially more for marketing their golf balls compared to Kirkland, it's pretty obvious.

They also sell orders of magnitude more golf balls than Costco's in-house brand. I'd even be willing to wager that KickX sells more golf balls than Costco.

1 hour ago, newtogolf said:

KickX, Vice, Snell, MG are targeting the Pro V1 market with golf balls that they believe are equivalent to Titleist but at a lower price.  People are skeptical when the price is too low, so their price point was ideal in that it was less than Pro V1's, high enough for them to make a decent margin but wasn't so low that golf snobs would potentially dismiss them as viable golf balls.

I'm not a golf snob dismissing something solely because it's cheap.

I also disagree that people are generally more skeptical than they are cheap… particularly for something that is highly replaceable. (It's not like we're talking about a $10,000 no-name car for driving their children in that is supposedly every bit as safe and reliable as the $30,000 alternative from a known brand).

1 hour ago, newtogolf said:

Kirkland has a huge distribution channel through their Costco warehouses, they are accustomed to selling bulk products at lower margins.

Do you think Titleist's distribution channels are larger than Costco's? Who sells more golf balls: Costco or Titleist? By how many orders of magnitude?

1 hour ago, newtogolf said:

Price doesn't always tell you about cost.  A $100,000 Mercedes doesn't cost $70,000 more to make than a $30,000 Mercedes, a big part of pricing is to reach a price point that attracts target demographics.  

I'm not making that argument. I'm making this one:

47 minutes ago, kpaulhus said:

Is it possible that these balls are 95% of what a Pro V1x is for 1/3 the price? Yes. Likely? No way. But 80%? Maybe yes to both…?

That's it.

I highly doubt that the Kirkland is even 95% as good as a Pro V1x. Could it be 80% as good for 33% the price? Sure. But 95%? I'm highly skeptical.

[Valleygolfer]

I'm pretty sure the xxx outs are probably included in the standard box. Not having QC like that would make me nervous about the ball. I bet most of the balls play fine. Everything in this world can be made similar with slightly to extensively inferior materials compared to a high quality original. No one is going to make a big deal about a cheap ball's performance in reality and if they do, everyone thinks "Well what did you expect for $X.XX a ball."

More than likely you won't notice but do you want to risk it...?

 

[jkelley9]

I'll add that Costco does have a rigorous quality control department down to it's suppliers.

I know this from this perspective: my father is semi-retired and came on board as a CFO-for-hire for one of their suppliers that had a huge chunk of it's revenues in Costco and they were kicked off due to poor quality control. My father came on board after that to actually implement a respectable quality control system (one of many things he was asked to do). He said that Costco was a bear when it came to enforcing quality control, specifically.

[baller7345]

14 hours ago, iacas said:

I doubt Costco sells enough golf balls to have economies of scale… Snell might out-sell them… not to mention Pinnacle, Top-Flite, etc. And if Top-Flite could produce a top-tier golf ball for $1.25 retail per ball in 12-pack volume…  why wouldn't they?

Top Flite Gamer Tours are currently going for $35 for 2 dozen.  $1.46 a ball.  I know it's not a ProV1 in terms of spin, but it is what Top-Flite considers their premium ball.  They say it's a limited time offer, but they have that offer quite a bit.  They have to be making a profit, or at least you'd assume so (I guess some car manufacturers sell certain cars for a loss...) so I do believe it's possible that a company could produce a tour level ball for much cheaper than what we currently pay for it.  I actually believe they already do that to some extent, though that enters into speculation and that gets us nowhere.

[newtogolf]

1 hour ago, iacas said:

I've never said otherwise, but without getting into the list of reasons why, I don't think I'm guessing as much as you are.

As I've pointed out, no other known good golf ball comes close to the $15/dozen pricing, including other big-name and smaller-name companies that don't have the "sponsorship" or advertising payroll Titleist has. Bridgestone isn't selling their top-tier balls for under $27/dozen. Callaway isn't. Even the Top-Flite Gamer Tour is $27.99 on Amazon Prime. Snell, KickX, Vice…

I'd still be willing to wager a couple of things:

• That Costco's balls are measurably/noticeably lower quality/performance than any of the Tier-A balls (Titleist, Bridgestone, Callaway, etc.) and the Tier-B balls (Snell, KickX, Vice?). I just think it's highly unlikely that they're achieving the quality, QC, etc. that even the Tier-B teams can achieve.
• That Titleist's "sponsorship" and advertising cost doesn't make up even the majority of the $30 difference between Pro V1 and Kirkland.

They also sell orders of magnitude more golf balls than Costco's in-house brand. I'd even be willing to wager that KickX sells more golf balls than Costco.

I'm not a golf snob dismissing something solely because it's cheap.

I also disagree that people are generally more skeptical than they are cheap… particularly for something that is highly replaceable. (It's not like we're talking about a $10,000 no-name car for driving their children in that is supposedly every bit as safe and reliable as the $30,000 alternative from a known brand).

Do you think Titleist's distribution channels are larger than Costco's? Who sells more golf balls: Costco or Titleist? By how many orders of magnitude?

I'm not making that argument. I'm making this one:

That's it.

I highly doubt that the Kirkland is even 95% as good as a Pro V1x. Could it be 80% as good for 33% the price? Sure. But 95%? I'm highly skeptical.

Okay

[iacas]

8 minutes ago, baller7345 said:

Top Flite Gamer Tours are currently going for $35 for 2 dozen. 

They're still $24.99 at DIck's: http://www.dickssportinggoods.com/product/index.jsp?productId=89023396 , and as you note, it's a Top-Flite.

It'd be great if $15 got you a dozen balls that were 95% as good as a Pro V1x. I'd buy a bunch, if not for me, for @NatalieB for sure! I just don't think it's very likely that a $1.25 ball is close enough to a Pro V1 that I'd play it.

9 minutes ago, baller7345 said:

They have to be making a profit, or at least you'd assume so (I guess some car manufacturers sell certain cars for a loss...)

Beware of that line of thinking. For example, my wife was a buyer for a major retailer before she went back to school to be a teacher, and they'd have closeouts because they'd already spent the money, and so clearing stock and getting $3 for an item that you'd otherwise get $0 for was still $3 better than $0.

That's not to say that the Gamers are constantly on closeout. Just that you can't always assume that a company is selling things always at a profit. There's a sunk cost to producing something.

[Golfingdad]

I think the bottom line here is that they're so reasonably priced that it's not going to hurt us to try them out and see for ourselves.

Certainly I'm a bit skeptical based on the price, but I WANT them to be nice. :)

Next time I need 5 gallons of mayonnaise, I'm also getting some golf balls!!

[baller7345]

6 minutes ago, iacas said:

They're still $24.99 at DIck's: http://www.dickssportinggoods.com/product/index.jsp?productId=89023396 , and as you note, it's a Top-Flite.

Not wanting to keep pushing this, but if you look it says "Limited Time Sale:  Buy 2 for $35 Must Add All to Cart to get Discount."  They have that offer most of the time it seems to me.  I know that wasn't your point, just thought I would point it out.

[drmevo]

I would try these but we don't have a Costco around here so I have no reason to get a membership. I'm assuming if you buy online you need to provide a member number or something? 

[JxQx]

This seems like the perfect opportunity for a 3rd party to do some robot testing on all these different golf balls from both large and small companies.

[iacas]

8 minutes ago, JxQx said:

This seems like the perfect opportunity for a 3rd party to do some robot testing on all these different golf balls from both large and small companies.

Which http://www.golfballtest.org may be doing, with whatever caveats you want to attach to their reviews.

[JxQx]

2 minutes ago, iacas said:

Which http://www.golfballtest.org may be doing, with whatever caveats you want to attach to their reviews.

That's pretty cool didn't realize there was a company doing that, I'll have to take a look through their testing a little later. They would definitely be able to test quality then if they could get multiple boxes of each type of ball, then test all the balls in each box.

[newtogolf]

30 minutes ago, drmevo said:

I would try these but we don't have a Costco around here so I have no reason to get a membership. I'm assuming if you buy online you need to provide a member number or something? 

You can order them online at costco.com.  If you're not a member the cost is slightly higher and you may not qualify for free shipping.  

[drmevo]

5 minutes ago, newtogolf said:

You can order them online at costco.com.  If you're not a member the cost is slightly higher and you may not qualify for free shipping.  

Thanks, I just found it after some digging.  It's a 5% surcharge. Not sure on the shipping. I didn't want to make an account and give them my email address only to find out I'd need a membership to buy them.

[No Mulligans]

1 hour ago, iacas said:

Which http://www.golfballtest.org may be doing, with whatever caveats you want to attach to their reviews.

I'd bet the review would be independent of any Costco influence.  Costco is too big to worry about a golf ball review.

Regarding prices... Costco can have some surprisingly low prices.  A local San Diego surf shop owner said that he was buying Morey Boogie boards from Costco as their retail price was lower than he could buy them wholesale from Morey Boogie.  Costco has really skinny gross profit margins, it has been reported to be around 10% of their products in general.  Kirkland isn't going to spend much if anything on marketing this ball.  

I wonder what percent of the Titleist ball is marketing and what are their product gross profit margins.

[No Mulligans]

Here's a guy that did some launch monitor reviews (below).  He concludes that the Kirkland is very similar to the Taylor Made Tour Preferred X.