Someone told me the other day that a retailer had suggested that the percentage payout in the Category C machines in its estate should be reduced, in order to make up a shortfall in the income which the retailer expected from the machines.
It is wrong to say, simply, “they never learn…” Those who made the suggestion probably have no history in the gaming machine industry, no fundamental understanding of it – and probably even lack the interest to attain that understanding.
The same qualifications apply to many of today’s machine specialists at retailers as with machine controllers in the days when the breweries owned the machines. Most of them are short-term appointments, spending a year or two on the machine side of the business as they progress through the company.
The difficulty for the humble operator is that he has to educate each set of new faces as they appear.
To reduce percentage payout may appear, to the inexperienced eye, the panacea for income ills. With machine income declining because the core player has too many choices for his money these days – many resulting from the grotesquely tilted playing field in today’s high street (but that’s another story) – and location numbers (the pubs) still in decline, those retailers are worried.
Those guys paying a brief visit to the machine sector as they progress on their corporate climb will be obsessed with one thing only – increasing the bottom line for their bosses, and they have no long-term strategies as they are themselves very transient. So they don’t care how they improve that bottom line.
It was ever thus. The brewery machine controllers were (in the main) exactly the same. And it is because we are stuck in this time warp of 1970s’ thinking, that the Category C sector has suffered.
Reducing the percentage payout would be disastrous – it would simply naff off the players. The retailers need to take a long, hard look at what they are doing to the industry and what will help that industry to help them, the retailers in the long term. That means throw away the unwritten rulebook, pay a decent rent for improved technology and therefore improved performance.
There are no guarantees, but better resources going back to the manufacturer will result in greater investment and better products. You won’t get a better cash box any other way.
But too many of the retailers - or at least those put in place to deal with our industry - are not around long enough to understand that.
