Coin Pushers

In my younger and more vulnerable years, I found myself taking part in that great American tradition of “youth baseball.”  After the first few hundred times I dropped an easy infield fly ball, though, my coach pulled me aside and confided that a career in athletics was probably not in my future.  And so I found myself spending more and more time hanging around the concession stand, drowning my sorrows in orange Gatorade.  Those snack sales were just one way that my hometown worked to raise money to pay for our uniforms, bats and balls, and over time, I found myself more captivated by the business aspects of the sports-industrial complex than by the game itself.

Every spring, like clockwork, the parking lot near our high school football field was taken over by the famous Farina Brothers traveling carnival.  The details of this fundraising arrangement remain somewhat murky, but I assume that the Farina troupe must have kicked back some percentage of their profits towards the town’s parks and recreation coffers.  But back in those days public accounting was still a mystery to me, so I was content to wander about the lot with an ice-cold Slush Puppie and watch the carnies do their thing.  And even back then there could be no question:  out of all the rigged games and dangerous rides, my favorite attraction was the coin pushers.

What first caught my eye were those rows upon rows of shiny quarters, many of them placed precariously close to that sharp drop-off ledge, seemingly ready to fall straight down into my grubby little hands.  At ten years old, it was the first time I’d ever encountered the promise of instant wealth, and the vision was positively hypnotizing.  

For the uninitiated among us, an arcade coin pusher works like this:  The player slides one of his hard-earned quarters down a chute, and then tries to “aim” the coin to make it fall directly behind the others.  A slider bar in perpetual motion then “pushes” the row of coins forward, hopefully causing some of them to fall over the ledge and drop down into a prize chute.  Some savvy vendors will even try to up the ante, stacking high-end prizes on top of the coin rows, tempting the player with special tokens, knives, or designer watches.

There’s something peculiar about these coin pushers that disables the critical thinking functions of the human brain.  In my own personal experience, for example, I never once stopped to wonder just how many millionaires might have built their fortunes by playing coin-operated amusements.  And it never even occurred to me to ask why the carnival had helpfully placed a change machine nearby, allowing customers to turn all of their creased dollar bills into even more chances at fame and glory.  No, my only thoughts were of how to get my hands on just one more quarter… because certainly, that next turn had to be the one which would bring down a raining jackpot of coins!

Although I spent much of my youth hanging out in arcades, I did somehow manage to survive adolescence and matriculate to college.  And during one dull semester of those four unremarkable years, I shared a tiny dorm room with a kid from Myrtle Beach (better known as the Las Vegas of the East Coast).  Piyus came from an entrepreneurial family, and he worked summers at his mom’s string of run-down hotels.  When he came back to school one weekend and mentioned that his clan had acquired a partial interest in a boardwalk arcade, of course I had to grill the kid about my own favorite amusement.  According to my new inside connection, the coin pusher manufacturers had a practice of placing secret magnets beneath the machines’ drop-off ledges, designed to hold back plenty of quarters and ensure the operator reaped a healthy profit.

But even though Piyus had definitively schooled me to what he said was the truth, I did my best to keep hope alive.  Like Fox Mulder on The X-Files, I guess I just wanted to believe that coin pushers were a legitimate game of chance.  And then one night, several years later, I nearly had the opportunity to investigate further.  

I was living down in Charleston, South Carolina at the time, having found somewhat stable work with a local law enforcement organization, when yet another traveling circus rolled its way into my life.  A fly-by-night carnival had set up shop in the parking lot of our dead mall, and I was more than happy to provide security as a hired gun.  That hot July evening, as I made regular rounds past the sad bumper cars and crooked water gun stands, I kept drifting back towards the outdated arcade games and the massive coin pushers.  Those machines were a continual draw throughout the evening, and the portable ATM machine plugged in nearby was seeing equally heavy traffic.  Every time I passed, I made a show of kneeling down to lace up my boots, straining to catch a glimpse of the coin pushers’ inner workings.

Towards the end of the evening, though, I got called to run off a group of teenage hooligans, and I missed those critical few moments when the machines were emptied of cash.  The head carnie on duty— an interesting character who carried a knife in his back pocket and bragged about he was pulling in $250/week plus room and board— seemed weighed down by a matching pair of hefty bank bags.  As the coin pushers were quickly covered with a set of heavy tarpaulins, we walked to the cash trailer, and my new friend explained how those machines were always the most popular draw at the fair.  He claimed that some customers, even after they’d played long enough to “win a jackpot” in loose change, still tended to keep right on feeding the beast, dropping quarter after quarter, playing late into the night!

But even after that close call, it wasn’t until another decade or so later, long after I’d discovered a knack for writing mediocre fiction, that I finally discovered the truth about coin pushers.  For so many years I’d accepted my old roommate’s explanation without question— at least, until one of my books called for a scene to be set in an arcade.  Thanks to a few minutes of Internet research, I was able to debunk Piyus’ claim that coin pushers are rigged with magnets, owing to the fact that American coins no longer contain enough nickel to make them reactive!  So I guess that’s a lesson for all you kids out there— even when you get to college, just remember, most of your classmates don’t know a damned thing.

Actually, all those coin pushers are built with a pair of long, narrow slots placed down along each side of the machine.  Whenever a new quarter falls in, even though it does help to push the other coins slightly forward and towards the ledge, its round shape causes just as many coins to move out towards the sides.  This means that although a few quarters might eventually get pushed over the ledge, many more coins will fall down the sides and out of sight into a secure lockbox below.  And as for any “premium” prizes set on top of the quarters?  That money clip full of dollar bills, for example?  Well, those are simply removed at the close of business each night, and then pushed back to a safe distance the next morning.

So apart from serving as the inspiration for a chapter in “Wikipedia Jones and the Case of the All-Seeing Eye”, it would appear that coin pushers really are nothing more than a waste of your hard-earned money.  But don’t take my word for it— check out this Youtube video for a close-up look at these frustrating, yet fascinating, mechanical rip-offs!