As ticket systems have replaced the old coin in/out, it signalled a new level of convenience. No more soiled hands, long lines at the cashier, stacks of coins in containers, or waiting for hand fills of the machines.

With these great advances, the number of slot techs and cashiers have been drastically reduced.

Utopia? Usually ...

Just ask patrons at the Niagara Fallsview casino on May 25th how they liked the tickets. The system started only being intermittently available starting in the late afternoon. The first sign of trouble was machines not accepting the paper tickets. Then, machines were giving handpays for low abouts --- like 25-cents ... when people tried to cash out of their machine. Within 30 minutes, hundreds of patrons were standing around waiting for "hand pays" of less than $10 each. The reduced number of slot techs had to put up with increasingly aggravated customers -- once a runner manually wrote out the number of payouts, they had to put an "out of order" sign of every machine. It took nearly an hour for many people to receive their funds. Some may have been longer. There was never an announcement made not to put $$ in the machines (as you may not get it out).

On the Memorial Day long weekend, the casino looked like a weekday by 9:00pm --- when things should have been bustling.

With lots of time to talk, we found out this is an all-too frequent occurrence at this location. A recent upgrade was supposed to ensure this did not happen again. This is only a 2000 slot operation. Something is very wrong when they can not track down the source of the issue. At very least, everything should be redundant -- this should not be able to happen any longer.

To summarize ... Ticket in/out is great -- as long as it is not broken.

/\/\/\/\ the Shamus /\/\/\/\