Feb 1988 pcb price list, got some half price

69er

69er

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A memorable day from nearly 40 years ago. Actually well below half price! Mostly new or just new old stock , shows how much they marked up the price to sell when the price got knocked down so easily?

I met the sales guy at Earls Court show in the January that year. He had just opened a small Deith parts depot quite local to us at Crewe and I already had an account buying many pinball rubbers, coils & bulbs etc.

Tempting me to call , all the boards were in stock in London but he had about a tenth of them ? available in Crewe also..

Cash power! I went with £1000 plus change in my pocket seeing what I could perhaps get? Not being too presumptuous?

Surprise surprise I came away with well over £2k of pcbs for the whole £1k… I did promise him lunch on me at the Cheshire Cheese pub in Shavington Nr Crewe.

Networking dinner came to about just over tenner with a drink and he then said he would pay and put it on his expenses..

Back to the shop he mentioned at lunch they acquired a big batch of pcbs all sealed in boxes of 5 for £250 per carton so I used this info ….. he had 3 Electrocoin cabs and a small Omni cab on in the display area one of which had his only Valtric pcb playing, also I had at the time never heard of his one in stock only Xain d’sleena , a total gamble, listed at same price £95 I recall I offered him £95 for the pair and he said fine ! …….. I said I’ve got to be careful as I only had a £1000 with me … That was serious money in 1988 !

I then offered to take his stock of 10 x Rastan Saga pcbs all sealed in bags for £700 and again tho priced at £150 each , I knew that the VAT at 15% was going to gobble up another 100 on 795 so got ready to do the paperwork!!!!!!

I began to talk about Heavy Barrel .. but how it needed the “twizzly” joysticks not many people would be rushing to buy it ? He agreed with my comment but said agin he only had one in his stock but it was dear? ..’could perhaps be around 3 ish soon? I said oh well I would think about it and maybe return with some extra cash?

To that he said …… you still have about £200 and you didn’t spend any pocket cash on dinner, ….. I must have looked a bit confused ? He said what say I chuck it in for a round thousand No Vat ? Wow !
12 new boards and one ex demonstrator for £1000.

Got home and ordered 2 rotary sticks from Shefras Spares and gutted my old Pleiades which needed a whole jamma loom and control panel rebuild but what a fantastic game Heavy Barrel turned out to be on our own arcade sites…… very lucky tho as the plywood cab later survived the Towyn floods in 1990 . Sea water 18” deep in arcade but pcb was fitted high up in the cab.

I was searching for a small artist paint brush not knowing what was in a drawer-.
Just came across those price lists and one I noticed only today …. Vigilante was newly added at £695 … by the early 90s we probably had about 4 of those for maybe as little as £30? I don’t remember how much exactly but how prices dropped and now some are worth more than they were new or new ish in 1988.

See these pics below! Rastan Saga featured on our cab flyers as production took off ! Handy as we were able to have 10 in stock ! For a while…..

Quotes may not be precisely as said at the time but the outcome was accurately recalled. Anyone else had such a day either via the trade or privately ? I know kingtreelo had a fantastic deal recently with his cab purchases for starters.

We were often lucky and had whole arcades given us and many strange trade ins on new pooltables or other things…. Even finding a one off arcade cab or pcb might have been a memorable day for you ???
 

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69er

69er

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Flyback2021 said:
generally how quickly would you recoup your cost on a board in the late 80’s @69er ?
What was the most lucrative machine you have operated ?
Click to expand...

Sometimes Never!!!! However …..
Impossible to say specifically looking back but do recall which were often full or regularly empty when we counted coins.

Had a lot of big return games and had some that never made half their cost back, sometimes due to damage but frequently at the time they went out-dated quickly and were soon out of favour…

If a game made its money back in 2-3 years and kept earning it was a bonus… in all honesty we never recorded specific game returns on paper so it’s difficult to state.
Also what might have been good or bad just along the road at the seaside wasn’t always reflected with us? Luckily fruits were very cheap and pushers and other centrepieces despite being costly lasted many years and steadily took lots of coins.

The end of season profit over rents , repairs, staff, new machines, public liability insurance, tax and other things like painting and lighting determined what we might spend in future

We tendered for some arcades so could lose the site year on year or win it back. ?

We were too nice to the county councils of Cheshire , Flint, Denbigh, Conwy etc and some big holiday parks with small arcade rooms …. But licences were always granted without too much trouble due to that niceness?
We also got sites like Bangor University selling them pool and table tennis tables, dart boards and accessories and siting video games in common rooms there.

It’s a Myth that you get rich emptying cash boxes on a wide scale. The big operators do it by contracting to breweries and leisure groups, hotels, cinemas, motorway services. Often they lease equipment short term off big suppliers like Crown leisure.

Some village youth clubs only took maybe a few pounds in a video and a pool table,
So ran at a loss but they were a useful winter site for cheap older games which no longer appealed at arcades.

Juke boxes were only supplied where they covered licence and PRS fees like pubs..

Over all pub sites and leisure centres did best… swings and roundabouts as they say.

To supply pubs with fruits and music required operator’s licence and music licence fees and only free trade pubs as managed houses were brewery tied and if you weren’t on the preferred suppliers list you couldn’t get stuff in… we got on Marstons list for a few year but only occupied two additional sites one in Llandulas and one in Llangeffni on Anglesey ….

As pool table sales agents we got several staff canteens , many pubs and they also had quiz machines from us on hire while they were popular. Neither required licences . We supplied Rhyl sun centre, Llandudno Megabowl, Prestatyn Nova. CARTIO go cart racing at Queensferry , 2 Tesco stores and several large factories some running 24hr shifts (Rowan foods Wrexham make supermarket ready meals) Eden vale Ski yogurt they made yogurts so we often got freebies with wrong lids when flavours changed over on the ‘fill lines’ ( nice to open blackcurrant and actually eat pineapple)

Some good ones Sega Rally , Daytona twin sitdown , Time crisis, fast n furious motorbikes, in fact most drivers and motorbikes….. other good earners op wolf , Michael Jackson moonwalker, Robocop , commando and Ikari warriors, to recall a few… some we never had probably did better? Had so many?

Bad ones Dark Seal, Kageki, Rock n Rope, wwf and Guitar Hero , sadly many were seasonal arcade in summer and moved to our youth club sites in winter where some got more abuse than use

Even in summer it’s two weeks Easter a few good bank holiday weekends and 7-8 weeks in mid summer… schools go back and arcades go empty! Caravan sites become ghost towns with a couple of retired folk who want the arcades open to gamble on pushers or 2p fruits but minimum wage prohibits staying open out of season and electric gets expensive if it is cold! Years when coin sizes or metal content changed were disastrous and costly!

The best games more costly to acquire were in pubs , bowling alleys . leisure centres and odd staff canteens (long hours access)

The majority of new pcbs went into the hundreds of cabs sold with game included and the price was recouped at time of sale maybe up to 3x cost as game added around £150-£300 to cab price , over basic non pcb cabs like 80% of Winfall ones as Tony acquired his own games like cheap football champ and various rogue street fighter variants.

A few cabs were specific request and customer knew they would be extra like the one police trainer, one TRON/GORF,? a couple of pole positions and several final lap3 drivers …. Cabs with NeoGeo 4 or 6 slot were dearer too

The whole set up balanced out until fruit machine licensing went to VAT (gaming machine line duty) on all CatC fruits etc.
To avoid VAT reg on some we split the company into five divisions but then couldn’t get vat back on purchases! However that side is much more attractive now on machine ‘shares’ not fixed rentals

A complicated life but if I lived over I would do it again but would try buy a whole caravan park or two and a storage container yard . They both made money out of us along the way ! Including depot/office.

Not forgetting a big cost the tail lift delivery and moving vans , the smaller service vans for pool recovering, cues balls and bringing in bags of coins, and travel to find and maintain the sites we supplied from a couple in Southport Lancashire across Cheshire &North Wales, round to a couple of caravan parks at Harlech and Barmouth(100 mile radius of Rhyl) but the boys did pool /snooker reclothing and new home table supply almost nationwide … biggest customer Stafford Prison… regular cover or re sale ?during night time hours only !!!
 
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