Ticket check.
Saturday 12 May 2007
It's certainly not unique, but in the arcades at my place of business they have this thing for the kids where instead of winning money on their various machines, they win tickets. These tickets can then be taken down to the lower bar at the other side of the park and exchanged for prizes.
Here's one of the more lucrative ticket machines.
You may have seen one like this before, as they have a few in the Old Town of Hastings (which pay out in prizes automatically). You have to stop the light on the right spot and then it re-spins and, a bit like a roulette wheel, rewards you accordingly. They have games like this throughout the arcade.When you first see this system, you pretty much just dismiss it as a pointless gimmick. It is, however, a fiendishly clever con. Genius, even.
The catch is that while tickets do mean prizes, the reality is that lots of tickets mean prizes. It's my understanding that in the last couple of years the chap who runs the arcades and is responsible for all this stuff revised his little system so that the kids would need ten times the tickets to win the same prize. What you won for ten tickets two years ago - a model airplane kit, say - requires one hundred today. Of course, for kids, the idea of 'prizes' is so attractive that they'll get every penny they can out of their helpless parents (many of whom are too pissed to care anyway) and go after these tickets like flies to shit. And that's quite an appropriate analogy, as most of the prizes are shit; certainly, what you get for your tickets relative to what you paid for them is fuck-all.
When I first started here I'd see excited kids with loads of tickets asking me where they had to go to exchange them. Now, I tell them that unless they've got more than 500 they're largely wasting their time. Now, 500 tickets can be won outright on the machine detailed in the image above, but guess how many times that happens? That's right - never.
In some respects it's a bit like the reward system in supermarkets and places like Boots; you think they're doing you a favour, while really what you're getting back is so insignificant, but you totally lose sight of how much you've had to spend over the last x months because they've chucked you a couple of quid to say 'thanks' ("Free money! Free money"). Yes, it's better than nothing, but relatively, it is nothing. They've bought your loyalty for the price of a decent cup of coffee. These tickets are worth even less. I'd estimate that any one ticket has a value of about a tenth of a penny, but probably costs, on average, 1-2p to win.
The arcade boss, incidentally, is a millionaire who drives a Porsche 911 to work. Go figure.
posted by Sheamus @ 8:00 am
