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Does anyone do this with golf drivers? I’d be hooked!

One of the problems with playing hockey and living in Louisville is that there are no proshops. Buy skates is tricky – every company (and product line) has a different type of boot and sizing chart, so you may wear a 8D CCM , but a 8.5E Bauer.

Icewarehouse.com provides free shipping back on their skates if they don’t fit. They had no problem with me ordering a size 8, 8.5 and a 9 skate and shipping them out to me, and letting me return the ones that didn’t fit for free.

That would be great for golf clubs! You really can’t get a feel for them at the demo range.

What’s the big deal? You still pay for postage.

For decades, you can walk into nearly any Pro Shop, be it tennis/golf/etc and they will do the same at no charge.

Golf pro shops are notorious for allowing you to play any club a full round of golf at no charge.

Interesting idea, however you have to provide a credit card and pay for shipping (which makes sense for obvious reasons). However this smacks of ‘free trial’ marketing promotions that count on people not reading/following the rules to the letter of the law and ending up “buying/signing up” for the product when they were just looking for a free trial. This type of promotion walks a very fine line.

Wonder what the damage rate is on the returned ones. Tennis is probably fine, but there are a lot of hack golfers out there.

Competitive Cyclist (http://www.competitivecyclist.com/road-bikes/demo-saddle ) does the same with road bike saddles. A new saddle can cost a few hundred bucks, and the only way to test them is out on the road.

I did this once and it worked out pretty well. In fact, I ordered some small items like strings or grips at the same time, and they shipped them for free in the same box. I ended up not liking any of the demos as much as my own racquets, so it probably saved me a few hundred bucks. The only downside is six days isn’t quite long enough to properly test out four racquets, and the shipping fee is the same even if you just want to demo one racquet.

Just tried this out a few weeks ago to see how the various K-Factor versions compared to my all time favorite Prince Classic Graphite. Much preferred to typical pro shop demos, because I could carry them around to various games/matches around town and they all had pretty fresh strings.

Yes, it’s a short window to demo, but it only took me 3 practices to make my choice, the K-Factor 95 hands down, and also ~$70 more than the Graphite. Great service.

Tim, not everyone has what you have. A huge percentage of the population lives outside the reasonable range of a high-quality pro shop (or even a pro shop at all).

@Anonymous Coward

If you live outside the “range of a pro shop”, I doubt there even exist places to even play tennis/golf/etc.

You make it sound like most people live in the tundra of Alaska … at which point – it’s so cold, would you even be outside playing tennis/golf at all?

I like this idea, but not for the typical reason. I don’t play tennis, but I’d like to try the game out. I like the idea of “renting” rackets for just the cost of shipping. I’m sure they’d rather not ship to me, though, because I don’t know what I’m doing.