Have you ever worked in an Arcade ?

Wondering about these types of jobs , the people who work in arcades is it lots of fun what's the job like ?

 

I didn't but I knew a guy who worked at the one at our local mall when I was in/just out of high school. He had to periodically vacuum, handle the ticket counter, wipe down/dust the machines, distribute tokens using his coin belt (they had the coin machines, but you could also get them from him and he'd give you them if a machine ripped you off), reset machines if they glitched out, refill the ticket rolls in the ticket games, handle customer complaints and also make sure the customers didn't act up too much as kids and adults would go there along with teenagers. He was also able to do things like DIP Switch based settings and calibrations for the light guns as needed.
I'm sure he also had to do things like inventory for prizes and tickets and tell the owner or manager what needed to get ordered or if something needed service.

Basically any mundane sort of thing that needed to be done around an arcade, he did, with the exception of actually servicing the machines.

 

Did he enjoy it? How did he feel about it?

 

I work for a company that does the arcades on a large amount of holiday parks/service stations/pubs in the uk must be around 7 years or so now

Been running an arcade for the past 3 years , cleaning , paperwork , servicing ,cleaning again , more paperwork etc

but on the whole i enjoy what i do , sure it has its bad times when you've got a particularly difficult customer one of the "i spend xxx here so i should get this and i pay your wages" type

still enjoy what i do

 

Crap work but it has its moments. Lots of cleaning, everything's dirty! Of course, arcades as you're thinking are basically dead nowadays.

 

I mean he liked arcade games and bullshitting with some of the regulars. There was a group of regular DDR players up until the place closed that were friendly with him. But, he was a young dude in his 20s at the time and like most people that age working in a rather menial occupation, it was just a job that was a means to a paycheck. But, it was a job that didn't drive him nuts as his boss wasn't a total dick and the customers were generally cool as the games were well kept and there wasn't much for people to complain about that was actually the domain of the operator. The type of job where aside from cleaning and a few minor things, you mainly just hung around.

 

I helped a friend run an arcade / console rental place when I was young. It was OK.

Typically what happens is wear and tear of the controllers. So this generally mean that replacements or repairs must always be done or you risk losing repeat customers due to bad controllers.

Earnings is generally poor. Especially on arcade machines. The console rental is slightly better as it's more consistent unlike a good arcade player where a single credit can get at least 20 minutes to half an hour. While console rental is charged in a half hour / one hour basis.

If you have more questions I'll try to answer them. =)