Ohh but there were free drinks and the lighting was just so and it made me feel so good -- so clearly defrauding the place that made me feel that way, even when I rationally knew that was what was going to happen, is perfectly OK.
Are you also OK with stealing popcorn at the cinema because they manipulate you into feeling scared/happy/sad/whatever?
This is why we can't have nice things.
The theater house rule is that no outside food or drink is allowed, but clearly the only purpose of this rule is to support the brazen markup of food and drink at the theater's own concession stand.
I find it difficult to find any harm to the theater in eating smuggled popcorn rather than popcorn purchased on the premises, even when playing Devil's advocate as hard as I possibly can. My worst attempts even end up replacing 90% of the theater employees with a row of vending machines and a subway-style turnstile.
I have a friend who used to be a supervisor at movie theater, and he told me that ~80% of the theater's ticket proceeds went directly to the movie distributor. This is apparently normal in the movie industry.
If concessions went away, theaters would probably need to raise their ticket prices a lot. Even if you drastically cut the employees, there's still rent/taxes/insurance/cleaning. The last two could also conceivably go up in price if it became normal to bring in your own food.
economics of movie theatres: https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/01/5905-2/
- There is a state sanctioned minimum payout rate. This differs by state, but its between 80-90%. This means that on average you lose 80-90% of the $$$ you put in. - Slot machines cannot use conditional probability, in other words spins are independent. This means that the machine has no "memory" each spin is like rolling a dice. You dont have higher chance of payout just because you didnt won anything during the last hour.
I've worked for a big slots company and we analyzed our customers a LOT. The big players (AKA whales) who drop thousands per month are not bored rich people in 99% of the cases, they are average people like you and me with a bad gambling addiction. And the state or the casino companies are doing nothing to help these people (why would casino companies care? This is where they are most of their revenue from). This is totally different from other fields - imagine if cigarettes would be advertised as something that makes you healthy and the state would be OK with it.
Yes. Yes it is. That's why they say gambling is a tax on those who can't do math.
The machines are programmed to give out less than they take in. In the middle to long run, you are basically guaranteed to lose money.
For example the article states that the house keeps $0.07129 for every dollar spent, or put another way, for every $100 coming in, the machines need to pay out ~$93.
Therefore, you can expect to lose on average $7 for every $100 you spend on slots.
No - this could be done fairly simply using components that are already available on the consumer market - all you'd need is a simple geiger counter and a radiation source (Americium, like in a smoke detector). Heck, you could go simpler with a transistor - google "transistor random noise source" - plenty of examples out there.
> Or, perhaps, the casinos prefer it this way of course.
This is probably the key. With a real random noise source, you probably couldn't easily figure odds and such (then again, how do they do this with regular games?)...
Sure, it would be better if it were truly a game of chance, I guess that's too difficult to deliver (and verify) at this point. Or, perhaps, the casinos prefer it this way of course. :)