Carnival Games (Replay)

This episode of Freakonomics Radio delves into the intriguing economics and deceptive practices behind carnival games, offering a deep dive into their design and the psychology used to entice players.

1. Carnival games are big business, intricately designed to favor operators over players.
2. The construction and maintenance of these games involve detailed craftsmanship to subtly increase difficulty.
3. Operators use psychological tactics and physical game alterations to reduce winning chances.
4. Some games are "gaffed" or rigged to an extent that winning is nearly impossible without insider knowledge.
5. Despite the odds, the allure of winning big continues to draw crowds, illustrating a microcosm of risk-taking in life.

1: Introduction to Carnival Games

Zachary Crockett sets the scene at a carnival, describing the atmosphere and the allure of winning big at seemingly simple games.
Zachary Crockett: "When you're at the fair, the world is a rosier place... And then you decide to play a carnival game."

2: Behind the Scenes

A look at how carnival games are manufactured and the family businesses behind them, focusing on Redbone Products.
Olivia Turner: "My dad has been in the business basically his whole life."

3: The Art of Game Design

Details the specific design elements of games that ensure profitability, like altered basketball rims and ring toss setups.
Zachary Crockett: "Regulation rim is 18 inches... Those are huge. You would have way too many winners."

4: Player Psychology and Operator Strategies

Explores the psychological aspects and the strategies operators use to attract and manage players.
Elliot Simmons: "The first game I ran was the milk toss game... He would say, if someone does get it in, tell them that they were standing too close."

5: Conclusion: The Metaphor of Carnival Games

Reflects on why people play games they are likely to lose and how carnivals mirror larger life lessons.
Matthew Grieson: "There’s something fun about... trying out a game and just having some fun."

1. Always inquire about the rules and odds before playing a game to better understand your chances.
2. If a game allows, inspect the equipment, like milk bottles in a toss game, to check for tampering.
3. Focus on enjoying the experience rather than winning big, aligning expectations with the likely outcomes.
4. Be wary of games that seem overly challenging; they're likely designed to be almost unwinnable.
5. Use knowledge of game design to choose games with better odds or where skill can increase winning chances.

Does anyone ever win the giant teddy bear? Zachary Crockett steps right up.

People

Zachary Crockett, Elliot Simmons, Olivia Turner, Matthew Grieson

Companies

Redbone Products

Books

Carnival Secrets by Matthew Grieson

Content Warnings:

None

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Zachary Crockett
When you're at the fair, the world is a rosier place. The sun is shining, and the air is filled with the smell of corn dogs and funnel cake. There's music, laughter, screams of delight coming from the rides. It seems like you just can't lose. And then you decide to play a carnival game.

There's something about these games that disarms our rational brains. We're willing to spend 1020, $30 for a shot at winning a giant stuffed animal that we don't even really want.

Elliot Simmons
Everyone, like, 90% of the people came there with a lot of hope, and they left, you know, just super pissed off. The boss literally said to me, don't give away any of the big ones, and they would make the rules even tighter. It was a mafia. For the freakonomics radio network, this is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett.

Zachary Crockett
Today, carnival Games. To understand carnival games, you have to start with the people who manufacture them. In the small town of Pacific, Missouri, you'll find a giant warehouse full of balloons, milk jugs, rubber ducks, and darts. It belongs to a family owned business called Redbone products. And if you've played a carnival game at a fair or an amusement park in recent years, the odds are pretty good that it came from them.

Olivia Turner
My dad has been in the business basically his whole life. Olivia Turner is the company's general manager. Her dad founded Redbone back in 1996, and like many people in the business, he worked his way up from the bottom of the amusement hierarchy.

He started working at Six Flags in Dallas when he was 15, and when they were opening the park here in St. Louis in 1971, they asked a group of guys if they wanted to come open the park and be managers, and he said, yeah, sure. Olivia's dad, Steve Turner, eventually joined a company that had been supplying carnivals with games since the 1930s. When the owner died, Steve took over. Turns out that's a pretty typical story in the carnival game business.

Zachary Crockett
It's a tight knit group of suppliers. Everybody knows each other, and many of them come from families that have been in the trade for generations. My dad was doing some ancestry work, and he found a photograph of his great great grandfather operating a carnival game. We were like, oh, my gosh, it's in our blood. Today, red bones supplies games and all the pieces and parts that go into those games to carnival operators in 21 different countries.

Olivia Turner
So we have got ring toss cat rack, which is the game where you throw the baseball at the clown balloon. Pop. Basketball is always huge. Everyone needs a basketball game. The company makes most of its revenue from the game parts that need to be constantly replaced.

The biggest seller we have is balloons. I mean, you would be shocked how many balloons we go through. Then you have balls and ducks and stuff like that. And carnivals are ordering those weekly as well because stuff gets lost, stuff gets dirty.

Zachary Crockett
One thing you might notice about carnival games is that most of those bits and pieces have custom specifications. Take the ring toss game, where a player throws a plastic ring onto a glass bottle. While you may look at it and say, oh, that's just a glass bottle. We look at it and see something completely different. There has to be the right specs at the bottom and the top and a lip around the top.

Olivia Turner
And, you know, what is that ring made out of? Is it going to make the right sound when it hits the bottle? To attract customers? One important part of that design process is making sure the odds are in the carnival operator's favor. Those basketball hoops, there's a reason that your shots off the backboard never go in.

They're not regulation rims. Regulation rim is 18 inches. Those are huge. You would have way too many winners. So the basketball rims are a little bit compressed or smaller.

They might be a 13 inch rim or 15 inch rim or a ten and a half. You have to aim for the center or the sweet spot to get it exactly in. Carnival operators pay top dollar for this kind of ingenuity. Red bones games cost from $3,000 up to $30,000 apiece. And Turner says she sells around 40 of them a year, either directly to amusement parks or to smaller companies that own their own games and contract with carnivals and fairs.

Zachary Crockett
Once those games are set up on the midway, that stretch of fairground with all the vendors, its up to the public to decide where to hand over their money. And some of those carnival goers take this task very seriously.

Matthew Grieson
I had always been fascinated with carnival games, and as a kid, I always, you know, had that envy of seeing somebody walking down the midway with a big prize and wondering how they did it. That's Matthew Grieson. He's a retired journalist and an engineer. And you could say he has a bit of an obsession. There was a carnival in downtown Detroit, and I went down there and saw this game called cover the spot.

It had five metal discs. And the solution is to try to drop those discs onto a painted spot so that you can't see any color. I would stand there with a mechanical clicker and see how many people played and what the odds were that they would win it. I'd watch it being played, and I saw, yep, there's a geometric solution to this. So then I went back home and I built a scale model of the game.

Zachary Crockett
Over several years, Grieson collected data on more than 40 carnival games all over Michigan and Ohio. He compiled his findings in a book called Carnival Secrets. In one instance, he stood at a carnival for 4 hours and observed 316 shots on a red bone basketball game. He found that only one in 40 shots went in. That's better than ring toss, where the odds of winning are around one in 700 shots.

But Grieson says carnival workers aren't too preoccupied with your odds. If you ask, well, how hard is this game to win? What are my odds? Is it one in 20 or one in 50? Nakarni will look puzzled because he or she doesn't think that way.

Matthew Grieson
They think in terms of what they. Call throwing stock, which means how much they pay out in prizes for every dollar they take in. They look at it like, I don't really care what your odds are of winning. I care about what my odds are of losing. And what those odds are is up to them.

If you find that you're throwing too much stock, if you're up to 50%, then you're probably saying, well, I have to move the glass plates further apart or I've got to change the angle on my wiffleboard.

Zachary Crockett
Carnival operators will also do everything they can to protect against people like Grieson, who know all the tricks. Yeah, we're called sharpies. A number of them have signs on the side of the joint that says, you know, one prize per day or something like that. So that way you can't go in and clean them out. So there are, like, professional teddy bear winners out there at carnivals?

Matthew Grieson
There's a few. There's a few. Gryson doesn't really have a problem with any of this. He says game operators have to make a living somehow, but sometimes they take it a little too far. That's coming up.

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Carnival games are designed to be hard to win, but in some cases, the company that owns the booth can make it nearly impossible. Step right up, everyone, to the carnival game alley, where the prizes are big and the fun is endless. That was one I would do all the time. People would come right on over or I'd do like a really strange dance, you know what I mean? Red Bulls and five hour energy.

Elliot Simmons
That was my go to.

Zachary Crockett
That's Elliot Simmons. He worked at the games at a carnival in Illinois for three summers. From day one, he was given strict instructions to regulate the number and size of the prizes he awarded at any cost. One of the first things they told me was, don't let the boss man see anyone walking around the park with anything. That's not like the little plushies, you know.

Elliot Simmons
At the end of every day, we would turn our money in, count how many prizes are on the wall, go in the back and count how many prizes were in the tubs. If those numbers were off, they would get really suspicious. Now, the prizes themselves, they're not especially precious game operators might pay around $1 for an inflatable guitar or a small stuffed animal. Even the biggest plush toys, which are rarely ever given away, top out at around $60. And some of them are truly bizarre.

They had one of those penguins with the bloodshot eyes. You know, it's like this stoned penguin. And I'm like, this is interesting for a kid's prize. But okay. Then you have the infamous live prizes, which can be an inventory nightmare.

We had a game where you would win a goldfish. They would just leave the fish there. One morning I came in and literally, like, 50 dead fish.

Zachary Crockett
If you operate carnival games, you've got to keep your costs down, because, as Matthew Grieson says, your margins are pretty tight. They've got to pay privilege, which is rental on the midway. They have to pay labor, they have to pay utilities, they've got to pay transportation, they have to pay for the prizes, and they have to make a profit on top of that. The rent alone might be $1,500 per day. At $5 per play, it would take a game operator 300 games just to earn back that one cost.

And that's assuming everything goes smoothly. It's a seasonal business, too. You're only open, you know, roughly between April and October, and it's weather dependent. If you have some rainy days, you could come up with some big losses. At the park where Simmons worked, operators used tricks to attract as many customers as possible to the games.

Elliot Simmons
The owner's son, he would just give him one of the big prizes to just walk around the park with, like, advertisement, you know, to make people be like, oh, wow. So that kid won. Let's go. And that worked so well. That worked so well.

Whenever he was at the park carrying that around, we had just tons and tons of people come over lining up for that game that I was working, knowing damn well none of them were going to win. And if I did let them win, I'd probably be fired. That sometimes meant outright ripping them off. The first game I ran was the milk toss game. You know what I'm talking about?

It's like that ten gallon milk carton and you supposed to throw a softball in there. Oh, yeah, I've seen those. I came in one day, and the owner of the park was in the back hammering the rim to make it a bit wonky. He would say, if someone does get it in, tell them that they were standing too close. So we had these back pocket reasons at all times why they didn't win.

If they actually did, it just sucks when you see some kids just genuinely enjoying their day and super happy when they get it in, and then you crush their dreams.

Zachary Crockett
Carnival workers have names for this kind of thing. If a game is gaffed, it means that it's essentially rigged. It's to the point where nobody can win it. But Grieson says these exceptionally unscrupulous operators are outliers and that most games are run in good faith. By and large, they're good small business people.

Matthew Grieson
These carnival operators are investing tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in their games, and they want to run the grifters off the midway. They don't like it. It gives the carnival a bad reputation. And just because a game is hard to win doesn't mean it's unfair. Part of Olivia Turner's job at Redbone is to be sure of that.

Olivia Turner
There is not one game that we sell that cannot be wonderful. These carnivals and amusement parks are under very strict rules from the states that they're in, so they get checked and monitored often. And if they're not following the rules, then they would get in huge trouble. Greisen has a simple trick to protect against renegade operators. Before you take a softball and try to knock down three metal milk bottles, you have every right to say to the kearny, I want to see those.

Matthew Grieson
I want to hold them. Are they full of lead to the point where I can't even, you know, push them over? There are no stupid questions. It's your money.

Zachary Crockett
One question remains. Why even take the chance? Why spend $20 to win a cheap toy in the first place? It's a piece of carpeting with a couple of little eyes stuck on it. But it's a trophy.

Matthew Grieson
And for a teenage guy that wants to impress his date, if he's got one of these under his arm, or she's got one under her arm, you know, that's part of how this all works. People have lost astronomical sums of money pursuing these trophies. In 2013, for instance, a man spent $2,600, his entire life savings, attempting to toss a softball into a bucket at a New Hampshire carnival. In the end, all it got him was a human sized banana with dreadlocks. Now, to be fair, there are carnival games where the player wins on every try, like duck Pond, where you pick a rubber duck with a fishing pole and get whatever prize is written on the bottom.

Zachary Crockett
Carnival workers call them hanky panks, and theyre mostly geared toward young kids. The prizes are usually worth less than 20% of the price of one turn. But to Grieson, the carnival is a metaphor for life, and in life, well, you dont always win.

Matthew Grieson
Theres something fun about a bunch of lights and noise eating food that's no good for you, trying out a game and just having some fun. Elliot Simmons is a little less romantic about it. If it's too good to be true, it is. You know what I mean? And don't get too excited when you think you won the big prize because life's gonna kick you in the ass.

Zachary Crockett
For the economics of everyday things, I'm Zachary Crockett. This episode was produced by Sarah Lilly and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had additional help from Eleanor Osborne and Lyric Bowditch.

Elliot Simmons
Kids would cry. Parents would yell at me. They would try to cheat. It would really get people worked up. It made it an exciting day for me.

You know what I mean?

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