x

Oct

31

2016

Payoff Tickets are Better for Everyone

 Payoff Tickets are Better for Everyone

Payoffs by bar-coded tickets have been with us for the better part of two decades now, but I still hear from longtime slot machine players who miss having coins pour into a tray after a big win.

The nostalgia is understandable, but payoffs by tickets have too much going for them to bring back coins. Time spent on hopper fills and jams has been eliminated, casinos have saved money on labor and on not having to keep coins in stock, and players no longer walk away with filthy hands from handling all those coins.

Still, players tell two sides of the story, as in these emails I received a couple of months ago.

DENISE: Everybody tells me the payoffs are better and faster now, and I can’t really disagree. But I still miss the coins. It was exciting to see and hear them pour into the tray when you won. Everybody around you knew when you’d won big, and you’d get smiles and congratulations.

I used to collect those plastic cups. I still have them somewhere, but my husband and I used to make a display of it at home. It reminded us of all the places we’d been. Every casino we played in, we’d take a cup home. On casino-hopping days, sometimes that was five or six cups in the same day. I miss that.

GERALD: How did we ever live without ticket pays? It used to seem like anytime you won very much, when you went to cash out the machine would run out of coins and it would jam and you had to wait forever.

I once had $600 to cash out on a machine in kind of a remote area of a big casino, and it took 15 minutes before anybody even noticed the lights were flashing. Seriously, I checked my watch.

Fifteen minutes before anybody even came over to my machine, and then 10 more minutes to fill it up. When you add in the time it took for the coins to come out of the machine and for me to put them in the coin cups and cash in at the coin booth, I was out of action for close to an hour.

Can anybody really say the new way isn’t better?

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