The Cost of Membership

Golf club membership subscriptions can vary dramatically by region and even by clubs local to one another. We consider why this is the case…

- By Jeremy Ellwood and Fergus Bisset. Photographs by Getty Images and Geoff Ellis

Have you ever been away somewhere or browsed a golf club website, looked at the membership fees and thought, “What the…? I’m paying double that for my subs and this might even be a better course or club. I wouldn’t mind living in this part of the world!”

All sorts of thoughts go through your head about such disparities, principle among them whether wages and house prices can really be that different? Of course, there are regional differences (as we’ll investigate in a moment), but it doesn’t go the whole way to explaining why decent clubs, say, in Scotland might only be £600 a year, while comparable clubs in the south-east of England would be twice that. So, what is going on? We take a closer look…

Supply and demand

Why do golf club memberships vary so much in price when, on the face of it, many clubs appear to be providing a similar product or service? Underpinning everything is the basic economic principle of supply and demand.

A simple Google search for ‘supply and demand’ yields scores of results, among them this fairly succinct explanation: “In essence, the law of supply and demand describes how, all else being equal, the price of a good tends to increase when the supply of that good decreases (making it rarer) or when the demand for that good increases (making the good more sought after). Conversely, it describes how goods will decline in price when they become more widely available (less rare) or less popular among consumers.”