Page 298 - One Thousand Ways to Make $1000

a week. A tavern, cafe, drug store, or candy store on a good neighborhood
corner in any city, however, has people coming in and out all afternoon and
evening. If more than five people are in the store all the time, you can bet that
your average play on the excavator is going to be pretty good. A machine
placed in a location of that kind will easily ‘kick out’ a profit of twenty-five
or thirty dollars a week.

“I pay my store owners a 35 per cent commission on the amount in the cash
box, less redemption pay-off. That’s a liberal split, but then I have my
machines in good spots and it’s worth the difference. In one drug store where
I placed a machine a year ago, the play runs twenty-nine dollars a day. It’s a
busy place all day long. A number of doctors drop in there off and on, and
they never go out without putting from fifty cents to a dollar in the machine.
Because of the heavy play in this place, I have to drop around every three or
four days and put in new merchandise.

“One reason why the ‘gold digger’ is so popular is because of the average
man’s belief he can beat these machines. As a matter of fact no machine is
made to be beaten. It’s made to pay a profit, and always does. But the belief
is strong enough to cause people to play them over and over again. They
don’t care what they win. Their objective is to beat the game. A few do beat
it. But a majority don’t. All play it for the fun of playing and for the sport of
winning. That’s the spirit that animates every player.”

During his first five months operating these machines, Ryan’s profit
amounted to well over a thousand dollars. He bought the machines outright,
paying eighty-nine dollars for each one. If you intend operating a machine of
this kind, it might be well to start with one or more secondhand machines,
which may be picked up at small cost. There is real money to be made in this
enterprise.

Service to Mothers Becomes a Business

O

VER two million babies are born in this country every year. That means a