Ask the Slot Expert: Casinos cash in on couch cushion change

One outcome of the pandemic is that many consumers eschewed cash and switched to contactless payment methods. That and an increase in online sales led to a shortage of coins circulating in the economy. Instead of going into vending machines and cash register drawers, the dimes and quarters you've been collecting in a jar on your dresser stayed in that jar.

Casinos dealt with the coin shortage by reprogramming their ticket redemption machines to dispense bills for the dollars on your ticket and print a ticket for the cents instead of dispensing coins. Players can take the tickets with "couch cushion change" values to the cage to get the coins.

This change didn't affect me. I used to play this old $5 3-coin max video poker machine that couldn't handle a credit meter amount that wasn't a multiple of 5. When you inserted a ticket, the machine printed a ticket for the remainder after dividing your ticket amount by 5.

I've had experience with putting in a ticket and getting another ticket back, but that's not why this change didn't affect me.

I used to redeem my ticket(s) at the end of a casino visit. I figured it was better to have cash in my pocket than a ticket. It's much harder to lose two C-notes, a twenty, a five, and two ones than a ticket worth $227.

The downside to this procedure is that I ended up with a drawerful of twenties, fives and ones. I eventually had to separate them into envelopes. I collected change too. Quarters went into one jar and the other coins into another.

I noticed that Jean Scott did not redeem her ticket when she was finished playing. I don't recall if we discussed why, but I came to the conclusion that it was inconvenient to have to periodically get rid of all those bills in envelopes, that I was wasting time by feeding bills into machines, and that I was going to be back in the casino in a few days or a week anyway. I stopped redeeming tickets and just left with them instead.

The only time I got burned with this procedure was when the casinos shut down in 2020. I had a pretty sizeable ticket that I would have preferred to have had in cash. I went to the casino on the first day of closure to redeem the ticket. I thought that even though the casino floor was closed, there might still be support for financial transactions at the cage while the casino was shutting down.

Nope. The security guard who turned me away said that there was no one in there to handle customer transactions.

So, I'm not affected by the change to "change voucher" at the kiosks, but other people are and some of them are pretty ticked off about it. An article about it even appeared on the front page of the August 22, 2022 edition of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. It began:

Instead of holding crisp bills, many tourists and locals have often found themselves irritated that they are stuck with a ticket voucher worth a few cents.

Do you see the error in the lede?

The editor should have caught it.

How can a ticket worth a few cents be converted into crisp bills? Put another way, players were still getting crisp bills from the machines; they weren't getting dirty coins.

In any case, players left behind $22 million in unclaimed tickets for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2022. Three-quarters of that goes to Nevada's general fund to, in part, keep me from having to pay a state income tax, and the casinos keep the remaining 25% as gross gaming revenue.

Has making players redeem change vouchers at the cage resulted in a landslide of unredeemed small-value vouchers and a windfall for the casinos?

Despite my alliterative -- and somewhat clunky -- headline, apparently not. The Nevada Gaming Control Board said that the ratio of expired ticket revenue to slot win has stayed pretty constant since 2012, when Nevada first began collecting revenue from unclaimed tickets.

Many players are irritated by the change vouchers, but what can you do if you're really, really (and let's through in another REALLY) mad?

You can be like Leane Sherer of New Orleans and file a lawsuit claiming that MGM Resorts International is shortchanging players when the kiosks do not pay the full amount on the ticket. Her attorneys hope that her suit will grow into a class action suit.

"The complaint said MGM provides no signage at Beau Rivage explaining that players cannot receive the full amount of their winnings unless they go to the cage," according to an article in the Review-Journal on September 24, 2022. The lawsuit said that Wynn Las Vegas, on the other hand, adequately informs its players.

For example, the kiosk at the Wynn in Las Vegas bears a sticker that says, "Machine only dispenses cash, ticket will print for change. Please take ticket to the cashier to redeem." Defendants casinos were far less forthcoming.

I think I can settle this lawsuit: Put a sticker on the kiosks.

Case dismissed.

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