For more than 20 years, one would find fleets of golf carts lined up along Washington Road during Masters Week, decking the fronts of businesses leading toward Augusta National.
This tournament-week staple developed courtesy of cart manufacturer Club Car. Local merchants would flood the company with requests to place refurbished carts on their property for display during golf week.
This tradition hasn’t exactly gone away, but a glance along Washington Road will find conspicuously fewer golf carts exhibited along the corridor. This is the trend, at least for now, according to Club Car, which says the growing dearth of the traditional golf cart display began before this year.
“We didn’t do it last year because of demand,” said communications director Tammy Cillo.
As in many industries, supply chain issues put a strain on cart manufacturers in 2022, especially amid growing demand across the industry.
“As you can imagine, there were a lot of folks ordering a lot of cars… we just didn’t have the cars on site to be able to place them strategically all over the town,” she said.
The COVID pandemic also impacted how the company managed the Masters displays. In 2020, the manufacturer opted out of its annual selfie contest, in which participants would hunt down carts at one or more of nearly 100 locations throughout Richmond and Columbia counties (mostly on Washington Road). Contestants were encouraged to snap photos of themselves in the vehicles, to be turned in for points, in hopes of winning prizes.
“When you take a selfie, you would kind of have a lot of people there together,” said Cillo, noting Club Car’s apprehension amid COVID guidelines. “And so we didn’t want that at that time, of course. We just wanted to take a cautious approach to that.”
Cillo also said that this year, businesses were not clamoring as much for the vehicles during Masters, and Club Car is reassessing the tradition and whether it will go forward with it next year.
Club Car, which is based in Augusta, was bought by industrial manufacturer Ingersoll Rand in 1995. California investment firm Platinum Equity acquired the company from Rand in the summer of 2021. Club Car itself purchased Danish electric vehicle manufacturer Garia in spring of last year.
Skyler Q. Andrews is a staff reporter covering business for The Augusta Press. Reach him at skyler@theaugustapress.com.
