Slot Machine Payouts Coins vs Tickets

By Travel Tunica on Monday October 12, 2015

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Among those who have been playing in casinos as long as I have, there’s a sizable number who miss being paid in coins clattering into the tray of slot machines.  On a September day when I cashed out by printing a ticket, the machine’s speakers resounded with an imitation of that sound, and a neighboring player told me she missed the real thing.

“I liked the coins,” she said. “I liked the bucket. Andy and I – he was my husband – Andy and I used to share buckets and play quarters in the three-reel  games. It was so exciting when the coins would pour into the tray, and everybody knew you had a nice win.”

I can sympathize with that feeling, but I don’t miss delays for hopper jams and fills, nor do I miss looking at my hands and seeing just how dirty they were after a session of scooping coins from the tray into plastic buckets.

Besides, if it weren’t for ticket pays, we wouldn’t have today’s penny slot machines, the most popular games in the casinos.

One important reason is that small coins cause more frequent hopper jams than large ones. That means delays for players, and time that the machine is out of service and not making money for the casino.

Besides that, buy-ins and payouts on penny machines often are in thousands of coins. If you slide $20 into a bill validator, that’s the equivalent of 2,000 pennies. Even if you lose $10 and cash out $10, that’s a 1,000-coin cashout. If you win, the cashout could be in tens of thousands of coins. That would lead to frequent hopper fills – again, with delays for players, time out of service for the game and labor costs of slot attendants to lug around bags of coins for the fills.

At all coin denominations, keeping coins in stock for payouts ties up money that could be used elsewhere, and if tokens are used instead – as was common on $1 machines – there’s an investment in having the tokens made. 

There’s a lot more benefit than cost to the ticket printers, I told the lady at the slots.

“Well,” she said, “I still miss the coins.”