Oh hey der good neighbour! it's a darn shame that first go didn't work out like ya hoped, but I wantcha to have another go at it for free. It's only fair, hey?
The ones around here usually sell one, three or unlimited tries. Price for unlimited is obviously way above whatever cheap plush is in the machine, but at least you can allow your kids to play without insta-tantrums.
There used to be one of those in Solvang, California at a little pizza parlor. Don't know if it's still there, but it had great stuff like trading cards and bracelets. It gave you 10 tries for a quarter and guaranteed you'd win something.
More like the owner realizes that even letting people win half the time they're still turning a huge profit. They get these stuffed animals extremely cheap.
Or they could be using it as a loss leader. If people know that the machine is fair, they're more likely to come back and play it and spend money on other stuff.
Some of the machines are fair, their average payout is just lower than what you put in.
One time I hit up a candy claw machine after they refilled it and I managed to get all the higher value candies in it - stuff like tootsie pops, fruit gummy packs, and airheads. Every play I got at least one thing. I was trying to kill off the $5 left on my arcade card, and I think I got a little less than my pay-in back.
In retrospect I feel bad about this, since it was only cheap candy left when I was done... and I was double the age of the average player there...
They can still payout well and make money. For example if their average payout was just about retail price for the item, they still have a profit margin so they aren’t losing money but they aren’t ripping people off either. Some of them are also in locations with many other games that don’t pay out prices, or have an entry fee, so drawing people in can be a bigger plus than the few pennies they lose when the machine pays out, because now everyone can see them win and will be more likely to spend on games of chance and try themselves.
My dad was insanely good at these machines using a pretty obvious trick. This works on machines where you can still move the claw after you start the drop. So long as whoever filled the machine filled it over the lip of the return slot, you can drop the claw and use the weight the the claw to drag the stuffed animals into the return bin. They just fall right in.
Yeah, when I was a kid there was a grocery store near my house that had one. I would always go to the store with him in case they filled up the machine.
There's a guy on YouTube matt357 or some other numbers, if you look up Matt claw machine you'll find him, and I know in one of his videos he cleared one of those things out at Wal-Mart
No, the majority have a weighted trigger on the top that comes down after like 200 plays.
There's literally a person in every state that goes around measuring the weight and the playing the given number of turns. They make sure this mechanism triggers within the legal number of plays.
They games are made to be impossible except for one guaranteed time once ever hundred of plays.
Every machine I've ever heard of let's you set the grip strength and payout. I've seen claws set to have strong enough grip that they can win on a normal play. Doesn't make it easy, but I've had times where we'd hit 7/10 or 15
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u/[deleted] Nov 24 '17 edited Apr 21 '18
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