If I remember my childhood visits to Chuck E. Cheese well enough, I'm pretty sure 7B tickets could redeem approximately 12 plastic frogs and an eraser.
Knowing accountants, outstanding tickets are absolutely on the books as a liability.
But it sounds like they were using accounting practices where that liability was created when the tickets were manufactured, rather than when they were issued to customers.
And shredding the tickets now has removed some of that liability from their books.
It must be location-specific. I went to my first one in decades this March, and we couldn’t finish the pizza. It felt like a kid’s casino with all the lights and sounds. The party was dystopian. It really soured a good childhood memory.
Chuck E Cheese is great for young kid parties. We've used it for our kid's 5, 6 and 7 yr old birthdays. Took all the stress out of planning, cooking, cleaning etc. The kids had a ton of fun and the prices were reasonable. The food was nothing to write home about, but kids this age aren't exactly very discriminating when you put a ton of cheese and sweets in front of them.
Thanks to globalization, this is no longer an issue! All you have to do is outsource it to somewhere where it is legal to burn it. Comparative advantage at work!
Burn it, and spend a million on planting trees or some other form of carbon capture? Probably come out way on top in terms of both CO2 emissions and budget.
I live in a city and the bylaws prohibit burning garbage. I imagine the main rationale is avoiding the smoke and the smell. I am sure there are also concerns about environmental effects and fire risk.
I think it’s mostly paying the vendor who manufactured them.
The tickets were created, the vendor wants to get paid, but CEC doesn’t want the product and is in bankruptcy so they are trying to pay ~$1MM less than full price to settle with the vendor and keep the tickets from being sold to someone else.
The containers sell for $5k to $8k each depending on size and condition. Maybe just sell them for $1k each and buyer has to agree to deal with what is in them?
What I mean is, if you want to buy a shipping container, they cost $5k to $8k (used). People buy them all the time. If they were doing this in about 9 months from now, I would take some of them off their hands. They could sell them for much less to get rid of them quickly and stop paying the rent.
I wonder how much they cost. Alibaba shows 1.88 for a roll of 2000 for orders of a 1000 or more. I bet you can push it down to a $1 for that volume not factoring shipping costs. Which would mean all these tickets would cost $3.5mm.
I hadn’t really considered how much environmental waste those tickets produced. Would reusable coins be cheaper and better for the environment?
When casinos gave up coins in the slot machines I think they did themself a disservice. The noise and excitement from dropping coins and the feeling of having a bucket full of them was an important part of the experience. I wonder if patrons of Chuck E. Cheese will care. I certainly enjoyed carrying around a bucket of tickets when I was a kid. And enjoyed seeing what other people were winning. E-points sounds less fun to me...
Agreed, but maybe the bias of liking the "waterfall of metal coins" is just sentimentality. I'd like to see some studies comparing physical coins to electronic rewards.
I get a sense that the vice industries (gambling, porn) are often a bit more consevative with changes and/or data driven in their decisions, so I suspect they have some interesting data on how people react to coin rewards vs. electronic rewards. I'll bet their data says the various electronic versions earn them more money
If you're a kid that has grown up with electronic devices your entire life, e-rewards are what is normal to you. This is the target audience of Chuck E. Cheese.
If you're an old fart that can remember living without electronic devices, then you'll probably have a natural affinity to a more physical type of reward. You might even be able to remember going outside to play.
Last time I was there with kids (which was a few years ago now), they had already started to migrate away from rolls of tickets for some games. Instead, you got a receipt-like printout that represented a certain number of "tickets". So, instead of getting 42 tickets, you'd have a receipt with a barcode that said "42 tickets". It's all very similar to casino slot machines with their receipts.
While this doesn't quite have the satisfaction of tubs of tickets, it is significantly easier to manage for the parents. And it makes it more possible to save tickets from multiple trips for larger prizes, should your kids possess the appreciation for delayed gratification (mine never did at that age). But I will say this -- I don't think my kids or their friends had less fun with the transition away from individual tickets.
What did you think they did with the tickets after you redeemed them. They were always destined for the landfill.
I worked at a Dave & Buster's as a tech. We were required by corporate to destroy any redeemed tickets, usually by shredding them. The shredder would go on the fritz because it was not designed to run 8hrs a day 7 days a week. When it did they would bag and bleach the tickets. Eventually I heard that they had outsourced the destruction to a mobile document shredding company.
Wha, bleach the tickets? That sounds like way more hassle then it's worth. A strong lock on a dumpster should be enough. If someone really wanted to take them then sure, they can have the ultra cheap Chinese made stuffed animals that cost next to nothing for D&B.
I recall reports of people dumpster diving for the tickets. They were bagged separate from the foodstuffs which made dumpster diving fairly effective. One 50 gallon trashbag full of tickets was probably enough to get some of the higher end electronics stuff. That was not cheap. Though tickets were an expensive way to buy electronics vs cash at an electronics store.
Seems like they could sell entirely different tickets to a Guinness-Record-caliber bonfire. (or sell them to a pellet-stove or recycling company).
Presumably the difficulty stems from the fact that outstanding tickets in the wild can still be redeemed. There's got to be a cardboard/paper recycler that would be interested in the containers and would be willing to find an expedient way to invalidate them.
Because they have the CEC name on them, and any company trying to use them in now on the hook for every CEC ticket ever issued to potentially be redeemed.
I was so confused by the headline until I read the article. Was there really a parent out there with 7 billion tickets? Why would they destroy them instead of redeeming them?!
Because they are going through the bankruptcy process - if you intentionally destroy assets during a bankruptcy without permission the judge can deny your bankruptcy and you might even be charged with a crime.
