Quoted from Roostking:You usually have a solution and I find it suprising that you dont. I dont understand your pushback on the obvious, pay someone enough $$$ and make it viable long-term.
What other solution is there, besides scale down or make it a pinball Museum?
I can’t be onsite for 30mins without strangers interrupting me asking for pinball repair work or referrals. The shortage of people who do this work is real. And that’s in a market where the going rate is over $100/hr.
There is a HUGE difference between the idea of someone who fixes games as a side gig or as a volunteer and someone who is willing to make coinOp their full time career and is willing to do the work non-stop. You’ll find an endless supply of people willing to give ideas or talk about helping… but where the rubber meets the road… and after a fee months you’ll find the help quite different from what was offered.
Hobby verse pro. CoinOp is a tough job with low pay.
I already said what my suggestion was… I’d be talking to the real pros who run businesses on the back of these kinds of techs. Not the guys who can get by with one or two lifers… the guys who have ro recruit, train, and keep that help on staff long enough to make it worth it. GEX, TNT, PPM, etc. find out who they have success with… what kind of pay they need… what were busts… etc. and maybe try to lure an established master tech to vegas to build around.
Obviously Tim’s need is beyond volunteers. But he also needs someone (besides himself) he can build a tech staff around. A staff that is going to need multiple full time people and augment with volunteers to handle the lightweight stuff.
But this solution is more than ‘just pay the man!’ — you need ‘the man’ and Tim needs to address the blockers they’ve had in the past.
Another issue is apparently they are/were super paranoid about theft so anything around the coinboxes was high drama and a problem with help. That’s not sustainable with real help and oins. Vegas is some of the most watched public spaces around… cone up with a monitoring or control system that eases that concern.
Their problem isn’t just ‘set a tech budget’. Anyone who actually hires staff these days knows better than that.