The role and model of the "Traditional Club Pro" has changed a lot and there are a significant number of Club pros still in stuck in the past.
The trend in the US in the late 90's through to a couple of years ago was to move to "Director of Golf" with the Club running the operation, this has certainly started to reverse as Clubs are starting to realsie what they have lost. The Club Pro is the "public face" of the Club.
In Australia the trend has followed the US pretty closely with the trend slowly starting to move back to traditional Club Professional roles.
In a lot of cases Clubs see dollar signs and think they can make good money out of the operation and when they then return a loss or struggle to cover costs they realise they have not figured in how valuable a good Professional can be.
We have a reasonable size operation with 8 staff working for me, including 6 PGA members, and we run everything to do with golf for the Club including all competition, handicapping, carts, range, coaching, pennant as well as retail. Members tend to come to us for any queries rather than the club office as we are always here.
I am also involved pretty heavily on match and greens.
In the sand belt only RM and Yarra have a traditional set up while the others run it themselves. The clubs running it themselves have the view that the Golf Shop is where members register for golf and they set it up accordingly. The smaller clubs doing this quickly realise that you cannot replace a Head pro who is at the club for 60 hours a week with an employed pro who is on 38 hours.
Yarra did run the shop when I came in 7 years ago and the annual retail turnover was 20% of what it is now and our members are pretty internet savvy yet we lose very few sales to off course or the net.
For some of the bigger clubs such as Royal Sydney with 3500 members I certainly see the sense in running it in house, they have 32 staff on the golf shop books and at least 8 staff always rostered on.
The PGA as a body need to be very aware when turning out newly qualified professionals that they need to be highly skilled in a wide range of managerial skills who make it their role to be involved in every aspect of the club and it's membership.