Here’s the Ticket
When a Candy Crane earns $3,133 in a week and becomes the #5 earning game (only behind Wizard of Oz 6 Pl, Big Bass Wheel A, Big Bass Wheel B, & Ticket Monster) in an 86 game FEC, we consider that worthy of ‘Breaking News.’ Ticket cranes have always been our top ROI game and revenues of $300-$400/week were considered exceptional. Even Candy Cranes priced at 25 cents/play or 50 cents/play with small ticket bundles earned well even when set to play to win mode.
However, over the past two months the Alpha Techs have been working on finding the best combination of ticket bundles and high hit frequency for a regular Candy Crane (we chose Smart Industries model for this test but are also using Coast to Coast’s candy crane) set at $1.00/play and a win% criteria goal of 25%. (See Test Games Report & Top 50 Redemption & Merchandisers Combined for details).
| Date | Candy Crane – Tickets | |
| Earnings | Percent | |
| 01/08/14 | $ 932.00 |
11.27 |
| 01/15/14 | $ 515.00 |
12.62 |
| 01/22/14 | $1,101.00 | 20.1 |
| 01/29/14 | $ 752.00 | 20.53 |
| 02/05/14 | $1,275.00 | 25.04 |
| 02/12/14 | $1,262.00 | 21.67 |
| 02/19/14 | $3,133.00 | 21.63 |
Starting out with ticket bundles of 25 tickets (our ticket value is ¾ cent), the Candy Crane ranked 23 of 86 with a win% of 11%. For the next week only ticket bundles of 50 tickets were used and the ranking improved to 18 of 86 but win% only increased to 13%. 100 ticket bundles were introduced the following week without seeing further improvement in the ranking but the win% increased to 20%. Then 150 ticket bundles were added and the ranking improved to 10 out of 86 and the win% increased to 21%. A little more tweaking and maybe the ranking could improve but just to get to the Top 10 was an awesome accomplishment!
Then we added more 150 ticket bundles and removed all of the 25 ticket bundles and the revenues increased again. In week 7 the revenue hit $3,133 (President’s Weekend). We are using equal amounts of 50, 100, and 150 ticket bundles with a total of 20,000 tickets in the Candy Crane at one time and a small mix of 25 cent per piece well known candy items. To build up the height of the tickets, fish tank gravel (plastic pebbles) was added to the base. The bundles are held together with the stretchable strings that come with the 2000 ticket bricks. Heavy duty colored construction paper bands with the number of tickets printed is used to add further colors. A sign behind the glass instructs the players to bring the ticket bundles won to the Redemption Prize Center. At the end of each shift the ticket bundles won are returned to the Candy Crane and the staff is instructed to fluff up the ticket bundles so the display looks ‘mountainous.’ If the ticket pile is not fluffed up it gets flat and the win% goes down and the players will stop playing as much. And the revenues will decrease.
As you can see, it takes a lot of effort to get the right shape, amount of the tickets in each of the bundles, the number of different bundles, best way to display them, the best hit frequency, and the optimum win%. The more tickets in a bundle, the greater the weight and the harder that bundle is to win. We also liked the challenge of picking the smallest game (2’ x 2’ footprint) and also wanted to see if we can stay at a low prize limit. In this case 150 tickets @ ¾ cent each = $1.13. The 50 ticket bundles are very easy to win. The Alpha Team did a great job on this and I have a feeling that the revenues can still be increased by increasing the win% a few more percentage points.
