Maximizing Your Redemption Business: Insights from Industry Experts on Cranes and Merchandisers

Struggling to maximize play on the cranes and merchandisers in your game room? In this installment of Redemption + You, merchandising guru Megan Burtch delves into this hot topic with some of the industry’s leading experts. Our chat with the pros dives into the beloved game room machines, revealing how killer creativity and modern strategy keep these games popular and customers returning.In this article, our guests talk about everything from super cool themes like scented plush toys and cotton candy canisters to smart pricing strategies and performance tracking. Read on or watch the webinar to learn how a focus on perceived value, experimenting with different tactics, and really getting what makes customers tick are key to crushing it in the cranes and merchandisers biz. The advice here is… plush.Meet the Experts:Lisa Westerman, Senior Entertainment Director at Austin’s Park — Lisa oversees game tech, game management, and prize orders for cranes and merchandisers at Austin’s Park in Pflugerville, Texas. With 40 cranes and 10 merchandisers, she manages a significant volume of machines and products.Lisa Price, VP of Merchandise and Marketing for Family Entertainment Group — With 16 years at Family Entertainment Group, Lisa oversees instant win and redemption programs across 80 locations, managing hundreds of cranes.Howard McAuliffe, VP at Pinnacle Entertainment Group — Howard helps facilities add or optimize arcades, overseeing about 30. He has extensive experience running cranes and merchandisers, previously operating a large route.Redemption + You Guests: Lisa Westerman, Lisa Price and Howard McAuliffe

Q. How do crane machines rank within your overall game room performance?

A: Lisa Price — “What we typically like to see is that to balance. If we have 25% in the population of the room, we want to see it [crane machines] contributing about 25% of the revenue for the location. Things have changed over the years with attractions coming in and cannibalizing a lot of offering. Being so beautiful [the new machines], you know, they absolutely attract attention.”A: Howard McAuliffe — “We use the same category balancing. I would add that cranes are great long term because you can use the same machine for a long time. If you keep them working, you can change the product, make them look new, keep the lights working. So compared to a redemption game you don’t have to reinvest in them, they’re cheaper in the beginning and you don’t have to reinvest as often. So that 25% is outsized in value over time, compared to redemption in video games.”A: Lisa Westerman — “Our payout is approximately that. Also, our cost-of-sales goal for the park includes our redemption, but [in terms of] our pay out on the cranes, we want to keep about 25% of that revenue.”

Q: What are some of your top performing machines?

A: Lisa Westerman — “Oh my goodness. We have a Big One crane. The Big One Extreme is consistently in the top five games, sometimes number one. We used to have 16 inch Squishmallows in it at about $18 a pop; now we have 16 inch knobby balls in it at about $3 a pop and it makes just as much money, and people win more often and are much happier.”A: Howard McAuliffe — “…Ticket cranes, I would say are number one. I also consider those to be a redemption game, not a crane, just to make it more confusing… So if we’re not talking about tickets, then giant knobby balls are number one. Ducks are number two. And then the Belly Buddy Crane is up there. It’s not licensed [but it’s] outperforming a licensed crane, actually. It’s just cheaper. So it’s the same thing as Lisa W. was talking about… You can have a higher win rate with a themed generic that’s not as expensive as the licensed. Sometimes, some licenses are worth what they cost. In this location, they’re not.”Guests can’t resist a machine full of Belly Buddy plush!A: Lisa Price — “So for machines we see right now, Fantastic Prizes and the really big Cut 2 Win games are pretty king. Right now, the product in those would either be a Stanley cup or a giant Mario or anything in the Mario license. Those two are kind of key, but we also see Big Win cranes always perform really well. We typically run balls out of that. That way we can constantly have kids walking around with the giant 18 balls. (Editor cutting in here… Ahem, “Winners Make Players!”) We do really good with E-Claws still — fantastic earnings… you can dial them in so precise and can put any price level in there. Licenses [that do well] would still be Nintendo and Minecraft and Bluey… and Squishmallows.”

Q: You always do a really fun job of putting stickers and and decals and things in the backs of your machines to kind of theme out with the product in there. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

A: Lisa Price — “We treat each instant win almost like a Macy’s display window. We switch out the decor for the prize. What we’ve gotten into, actually, is in our office here in lovely Norwalk, Ohio… we got a large printer and we print out what we call a ‘planogram poster’… So it’ll either have decor elements and we’ll tell [our locations] where to order those, or we’ll actually just ship them out a poster that matches their product.”Decorated Crane Machine at a Family Entertainment Group Location

Q: You’ve done some really cool things and have found creative ways to to display things. For example, you put the tension rods in the backs of the machines to show off prizes. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

A: Lisa Westerman — “Well sure, a lot of the cranes actually have shelves in the back, but a lot of them don’t. The ones that don’t, we put tension curtain rods in so that we can hang the plush or sit the plush back there so that it displays better rather than just having a big mirror back. Because we change out products, sometimes very frequently, it doesn’t pay for us to kind of try to make something. I’ve used little suction cups & hooks in the back to hang things. Occasionally we’ll hang things from the front of the back cross-rod if it’s just a support rod and it doesn’t have the crane on it.”

Q: Do you find once you decorate these cranes and give them a personality and up the display level, do they perform better than if you just have the mirror?

A: Lisa Westerman — “Oh, 100%. Absolutely.”A: Lisa Price — “We actually did a study on that. We put an undecorated game with a pretty even earning license, a pretty consistent earner, and on the other side did a undecorated crane against the decorated crane. [Even with] really comparable licenses, the decorated crane outperforms all the time, every time.”Tension Rods Help Elevate Items to Eye Level

Q: How often do you decide to change out product?

A: Lisa Westerman — “We always have logo basketballs in one and in the other one, we have Nintendo license plush, the 16 inch, and that does so well. Once in a while we’ll flip that out with some jungle animals because they’re every bit as popular, or some Care Bears. But, the licensed cranes, we try to leave the licenses in, like the Hello Kitty Crane and the Smurf Crane. Sometimes we will find that an item that doesn’t do well in one area of the park does really well in another area and it’s similar size. So that’s just kind of dialing that in.”

Q: Do you recommend a certain cadence to your clients or hear from them how often they switch out their product?

A: Howard McAuliffe — “Yeah. It depends somewhat on the type of location. Like, when we [ran our crane route] in Walmart where it’s the same people that go every week, in a lot of cases, it’s a lot different than an FEC. So, we were changing [product] at least once a month; more like every three weeks. But then in an FEC typically every other month. But as Lisa W. was saying, some items like the giant knobby balls are going to stay in there. We might change up the design of them a little bit. Ideally, someone is tracking the cranes, which can only really be done manually if you can’t automate it like ticket redemption. If you want to know what’s in the cranes and how they’re performing, if you’re focused on it, a really good hourly person can do this if they’re managed. When the sales start to tail off, then rotate it up. But as a rule of thumb, between 30 and 60 days.”A: Lisa Price — “‘I’m going to fall in between Howard and like Lisa, both. We have neighborhood joints and then we have vacation places where people come once a year. So for those neighborhood joints, depending on the license, we’ll monitor performance pretty heavily. If the license has some variation, like there’s a new series and there’s new characters… We’ll monitor performance first. That’s always going to be key. The percentage of contribution to the overall earning is what we watch, because not all locations are apples to apples, even with the same licenses.”

Q: How do you all feel about seasonal merchandise and cranes like your Halloween or, you know, Christmas merchandise? What are your thoughts on putting those into machines?

A: Howard McAuliffe — “… It’s always tricky because some things that are very blatantly for a holiday, if you get stuck with it… It looks really bad to have Christmas stuff the day after Christmas or certainly the day after New Year’s. In the past I tried to do things like zombies at Halloween, where you can kind of keep using them, or a spring mix that works for Easter — but it’s not an Easter bunny, or a winter mix.A: Lisa Westerman — “I do very limited seasonal merchandise for the same reasons that Howard had mentioned. Although for Christmas I’m a little bit easier going because we do pull it out [of rotation]. We sometimes will do a Christmas in July crane where we just go over the top with Christmas… but for the most part [we’re] very limited on seasonal merchandise, unless it’s something that looks a little more generic and not holiday specific. That way you’re not stuck storing merchandise for a long period of time or, you know, just putting it on the bottom of the crane…”A: Lisa Price — “I’m opposite of Howard. I’m going to avoid it like the plague; usually because it doesn’t earn what our other licenses typically earn. Unless you have those unicorn items that come along once in a lifetime, like Peeps in their heyday… Or, this year we might try Beetlejuice because there’s a new Beetlejuice movie coming out and he’s kind of Halloween… We did Ghostbusters last year. So, we’ll do it when we have to. But typically, as a rule, it’s hard to manage multiple locations and we just don’t have storage room…”

Q: So if you were to put out any seasonal merchandise, how far out ahead of the holiday or the event would you recommend starting to put that out?

A: Howard McAuliffe — “I would say six weeks generally. It kind of depends… like if it’s Christmas, [or] Thanksgiving weekend, it’s a little bit less than six weeks. Valentine’s Day — in the middle of January. Valentine’s Day was always, at least on the route which was primarily Walmart, was the best by far. The cranes would do phenomenal for some reason.”

Q: What are some of the more creative ideas that you guys have put into machines or seen put into machines?

A: Lisa Price — “One of my favorites was we actually did a scent machine. So, on the top of the crane there were little smaller plushies, they actually were scented with scent beads in them. We put a chocolate perfume, or a fragrance, on top of the machine, and it dispersed that chocolate fragrance so that you’re kind of engaging all the senses… We’ll fill [machines] with coffee if it’s a coffee themed crane. We actually just saw somebody do sand in one of our cranes. I don’t recommend that.”A: Lisa Westerman — “A few months ago my boss told me he wanted to put these canisters of cotton candy in one of the cranes and he directed me to figure out a way to do it. We’ve put the [cotton candy canisters] in a Grab-and