Holy bananas.

coin machines might cover a broader market than coin-op. I doubt there is $1MM a year in operating coin machines. However, if one is selling coin machines (vending, entertainment, etc) that would certainly be in the realm of a $1MM a year gig.

Definitely would be pretty easy to not claim the cash/coin income "well, we only made $30 in quarters this week...*pockets the other $100 in quarters in the box*"

Surely that is a business that sells coin machines

An interesting quote from the company's owner, from 2010...
http://tapmag.com/2010/09/15/will-that-be-paper-or-plastic/
"Paperless money is too hard to collect," said Dan Goins, owner of Kelly Coin Machine Company in Carroll, Iowa. "I like cash. The customers spend it and you have it in your hands."
(Of course, paperless transactions are also harder to hide from the taxman...)

I suspect most of the money in coin-op is from stuff like quarter-pushers, bartop games, and redemption crap. Even traditional arcade games, much less pinball, have fallen by the wayside on location. (There are still a couple of popular arcade video games... Golden Tee, Big Buck Hunter, and those Pacman/Galaga combos come to mind. They must be earning something, or they wouldn't be so common on site.)

+1 That's what I was thinking.

lol... halarious.

depending on the location and the type of machines, that is not as far fetched as some may think. before we got out of the route side of the business we had about 7 FEC style location (redemption, video, merchandisers, etc) and about 95 standard (bars, campgrounds, resorts, etc) and one of the FEC hit $950,000 gross for the year. This was back in 2001, so it would think that it is entirely possible for an operator to hit the kind of numbers stated if they are doing more than just street locations.

Yeah hard to imagine because we put in 1 quarter here and there. But when it comes to volume then the numbers line up.

Look at what the airlines made for charging for baggage.

Were going to charge $25 for bags.... cool we should made some side cash. Try 3.4 Billion in 2011.
Thats over 3000 million dollar bills if there were such a bill.

I don't like naming where I've worked before, but people could figure this out if they cared... but there was another location near to our store that made over $1,000,000... per month. Of course that wasn't all game play, but it makes $4.8 mil over three years seem pretty easy - this store would've pulled in $36 mil in that timeframe.