Nice website and shop. Cool selection of pins for sale too. You're fortunate to have him nearby.

I have been working with Paul Hodges for a long time now. He is a really good guy. Go play pinball at Paul's!

One of thsee shops popped up nearby to me too. Pinhead Amusements out of Bedford, PA. He doesn't advertise as an arcade but they do offer one price admission, play all you want. Also host parties. Everyrhing is for sale too. I believe he does refurb/repair work as well.

It's a niche "industry" that will be ok as long as the mania with "collectors pricing" continues in some regard.

Provided you're in an area with enough monied people who want pins and are interested in high-margin skilled restoration work it might be sustainable for a good while. The problem comes with trying to actually make a decent living at it; the amount of time that goes into true quality restoration work, especially when you have to start fabricating things on a bespoke basis, gets out of hand fast when someone else is paying the check.

There ought to be a hell of a price gap between "players" games (those that display ordinary wear and tear from time and use in a commercial environment), "players+" games (those that were either refurbished -- not restored -- after coming off a route and have little PF wear, all electronic/mechanical issues fixed, but cabinet fade, etc) and "collectors" games (those in new or new++ condition that have been *restored* including cosmetics.) The labor to do the latter, even with a "HUO" game or one that became HUO before playfield wear occurred is tremendous. Those sorts of games will always carry a premium price and should but the candidates for that sort of treatment are few and far between with any sort of economic justification and I suspect the clientele who will pay those prices are quite few in number. Consider that if you put a man-week of labor into such a restore 40 hours of your time @ some reasonable skilled labor rate (e.g. $50) means you just tossed $2,000 into the machine -- now how many true restorations, not "touch up, shop and fix" jobs, can you do with one man-week of labor? (ha!) Is that labor input, plus the cost of the parts (or their fabrication) at a rational mark-up, recoverable on a sale? It had better be or you've got an unstable business model. Further, in a given area there may be some decent amount of service revenue available from those who own pins but cannot (or don't want to) maintain and repair them on their own *and* are willing to pay a good amount of coin to have someone come out and maintain or fix them.

Today there has been a lot of compression in the pricing and it's almost all been from lift on the bottom, which is flat-out backward and is why I often comment that the current state of the market is ridiculously frothy. When, not if, this corrects the used machine market for all but fully-restored (that is, "new++" condition) machines is going to fall apart on price; I fully expect to see 75% falls *or more* for a lot of titles from where they often sell now. If you're in this business and not in any dependent on that pricing being maintained to stay alive then you have a potentially sustainable environment. You just have to be quite careful that you're not predicating your business on the continuation (or worse, continued escalation) of used-condition games in the marketplace; IMHO you need to be getting essentially all your revenue on the service side either restoring machines or servicing them so you're insulated (or would even benefit from!) a collapse in price of games in the used marketplace. IMHO that correction is inevitable simply because of the impossibility of earn-out given current new pin pricing; you have multiple unstable elements that are allowing the current manufacturers to get away with this and the one thing every entrepreneur knows is that change is the only constant in business.

Interesting take.

I will say that certain restorers are doing things the right way. They are having the customer bring them the game and they are selling the service of restoring the game. If a restorer is restoring a game to hopefully sell to a customer that's a precarious setup. A couple of miscalculations on which game to restore and you're sitting on an overpriced paperweight and soon to be out of business.

If I were to open a business, I would go the club route... Much less hassle, be a lot more flexible in hours, etc.

Exactly.

Bespoke, individual jobs where you're selling the service is a reasonable business. The primary risk there is one of a drying up of people who are willing to buy your services. If that happens you're not going to suffer much of a loss if anything at all; you wind up operations and go do something else. That sort of business model is sound and can turn a nice profit.

Running a "gameroom" (whether you call it that or not) where you take in games, restore/refurbish them and then sell them as a material part of your income stream, in the current pricing environment, is another matter entirely. You are inherently carrying monstrous leveraged free-cash flow risk that can materialize without warning, and the larger your operation is and the more-dependent on the rollover of machines you are the greater your operating leverage. Leverage in any business (and in your personal life) is dangerous but when you are relying on uneconomic market conditions (e.g. price expansion that grossly exceeds CPI, etc) you're doing essentially what the condo flippers were in Florida before the housing blowup -- they put down 10% of their own money, another 10% came from a LOC from their bank, and the rest was due to at a closing they never intended to have happen since they'd sell the reservation for more than they paid before the building was completed. It was a great scheme and could return 100%+ on investment since you only needed to sell for 110% of what you "paid", right up until the buyers disappeared and suddenly you're called upon to deliver the other 90% of the money you committed to spend and neither have it nor can you acquire the financing to close. Then you lose not only your 10% but the bank comes after you for the LOC and you find yourself in bankruptcy court.

If you gear up into any sort of market where the model relies on uneconomic pricing make sure you're using someone else's money and you do it in a multi-member LLC or C corp so you can walk off without losing all but (in Florida anyway) your house when, not if, your world comes apart on you.

Unless you restore a SS EK. I hear those are 16k machines now....