Arcades without alcohol or freeplay?

I am interested in learning more…I can't see how an arcade can make $$ without alcohol. Or maybe said another way maybe it can but "with" alcohol it can make way more?
It all depends on what you consider "making money". Some people call paying their leases and pocketing $100 making money, others don't consider it making money unless they're making hundreds per hour. Totally a subjective term. No one ever talks numbers, when they have, I haven't found it to be anywhere near what I'd call profitable.
 
Have you been to a Pins Mechanical? Those places stay busy. They try to get both crowds… earlier in the day I see families having bday parties for their kids. In the evening it's packed with 20-30 somethings, buying $10 beers. (in the midwest, $10 is a lot for a beer). They won't get gradeschool classes and church groups, but they get everyone else.

I've been to the Indy Coke location, and the 3 in Columbus. All great, all slightly different. No vids in Indy!

A couple of the Columbus locations have a very impressive lineup of freeplay, CRT videogames, a partnership with 16bit Arcade. I only saw ONE game not working when I was there recently!

Best of all… NO REDEMPTION!
 
Player's Choice in the Myrtle Beach, SC mall operates on quarters only, not even tokens. They double as a retro game store but have an entirely separate mall space next to the store dedicated to the arcade and even more games in the store.
 
Right clearly staying afloat is one thing but is anyone m
I own an arcade without freeplay/alcohol. We've been at our current location for nearly 5 years. Started on quarters, tried freeplay for one summer, switched to tokens 1 year in, and then added redemption on year two. Redemption is what keeps the bills paid and gives me enough money to add more actual video games for those who appreciate them.
maybe a silly question but any benefit on switching from quarters to tokens?
 
Tokens offer more flexibility in pricing and allows you to include them with party packages. (birthday parties are a must for an arcade) At my arcade, you get an extra 4 tokens with $10 and an extra 12 for a $20. It encourages people to spend more. The downsides of tokens are you will get someone else's tokens from time to time and they are expensive. I think I paid $.16 each for the last batch of 20,000 tokens. Doesn't seem too bad right? Except that the tokens evaporate and you're frequently buying more of them to replenish. The token companies claim, that the disappearing tokens are extra profit and on paper it looks that way, but it hurts every time I have to spend a couple grand on tokens. :)
 
Tokens offer more flexibility in pricing and allows you to include them with party packages. (birthday parties are a must for an arcade) At my arcade, you get an extra 4 tokens with $10 and an extra 12 for a $20. It encourages people to spend more. The downsides of tokens are you will get someone else's tokens from time to time and they are expensive. I think I paid $.16 each for the last batch of 20,000 tokens. Doesn't seem too bad right? Except that the tokens evaporate and you're frequently buying more of them to replenish. The token companies claim, that the disappearing tokens are extra profit and on paper it looks that way, but it hurts every time I have to spend a couple grand on tokens. :)
The card systems are the most flexible and definitely hide the costs the best (no one can figure out how much a game costs to play without a calculator!). But I'm sure those systems are far more expensive than even your token purchases!
 
Card systems are a mixed bag. I've been looking into them for some of my other locations. Collecting the tokens or money is truly a PITA and having the money in the games leaves lots of opportunities for theft. Not to mention coin jams and explaining how many tokens each game is. We get people almost every day that we have to explain how get and use tokens. As a child of the eighties, I feel part of me die every time it happens :) . The reporting features that some of the card systems offer is extremely appealing to me also. But when you have over 100 games on the floor, the costs of the card systems add up to a shocking number. Each reader is a few hundred, then you need kiosks. The card systems also eliminate some of the more popular games like coin pushers and roll down type redemption games. I also am concerned about the single point of failure with the card systems. There were a few outages last year from all of the major card systems. One company managed to have major outages on two of the 3 day weekends last summer. A lot of the companies have jumped into the cloud solutions and left the users without any form of fallback should there be some sort of communication problems. With the Tokens, I don't really have a single point of failure. (Maybe the changers or ticket eaters but I have multiple of each on the floor and I could always count or hand them out by hand).
 
Right clearly staying afloat is one thing but is anyone m

maybe a silly question but any benefit on switching from quarters to tokens?
For us the switch was mainly fuelled by the need to accept credit/debit cards. But as others have said, it gave us a lot more flexibility and saved us time from dealing with rolled coins at the bank.
 
For us the switch was mainly fuelled by the need to accept credit/debit cards. But as others have said, it gave us a lot more flexibility and saved us time from dealing with rolled coins at the bank.
This is another topic about operating that you don't think of until you encounter it. The banks absolutely hate cash deposits with small bills. It ties up the teller way too long. One bank I deal with put a surcharge on cash deposits. It was an amount per month and transaction. I never could get it explained properly to me. Something like $3000 a month max or over $800 per deposit would trigger it and it would happen at the end of the month. So, I went with a credit union. But the Credit Union wants nothing to do with 3rd party credit card processors, so now I have 2 different banks for the business.
 
There is a traditional coin-op arcade at the Berkshire Mall in Berks County, PA, called Challenge Arcade.


I don't know the proprietor personally, but they have an active page on Facebook you could reach out to. I believe it's basically her personal collection.

It's not a glitzy place, but they have a pretty cool collection. I think everything is only a quarter to play. Even some of the pins.
Necro post, but pretty sure this mall is where I saw both DL and Reactor for the first time in the mid 80s.
 
Back
Top Bottom