If a player leaves their coin voucher on top of an ATM machine, can another player legally collect that coin voucher and claim it as their own? I don't think that they legally can.. but I am just assuming and don't really care enough to Google this.

I am not interested in doing this, but I have seen people going around collecting the coin vouchers off the top of the ATM machines. I cashed in a video poker ticket and recall seeing dozens of these slips left on top of the ATM the last time I played.

If you want to make a point, make a YouTube video of you going into every single casino on the strip and collecting the coin vouchers.

I bet if you start at Mandalay Bay and work you way down to the Strat, you'll have a few hundred bucks.... I presume as long as you don't cash them in.. .the end result is the same... The state gets 75% and the casino gets 25%.

100% this should be a generic option on every slot machine. They can even build it in so they still have an edge(if you have $0.20, you are going to hit that dollar 1 in every 6 times).

The Gyms don't create a ridiculous burden in order for you to use them though.

If it takes 10 minutes to cash a 50 cent voucher that means you're getting $3.00/hr. Even a min wage worker would be wasting their time. That's like if I borrowed $1,000 from you and then said I'd pay it back but you have to fly to Japan to come pick it up.


If there is no donation option, I'll give my ticket to some random slot jocky. But I'd rather be paid what I'm owed.

What ridiculous analogies.

The casino isnt making the wait time longer for <$1 cash outs. If you have a $10,000 ticket you have to wait the same amount of time. If you have $5 or $2000 in chips you have to wait the same amount of time.

Are you suggesting lower value tickets should get priority at the cage?

Remember the machines are there as a convenience/luxury, they are not required.

Any half decent lawyer should be able to get this thrown out very quickly.

Outside of the lawsuit, casinos should allow you to redeem these coin receipts in the form of credits onto your players card. That would actually be more beneficial to the casino. They would keep 100% rather than 25% of that revenue because the player would redeem the $ (or lose it if they never redeem it) inside the casino for food, drinks, gift shop, room credits, etc.

You could program the slots/video poker machine/etc to have the loyalty app ask the user to round down and credit the players card that is inserted into the machine in the form of comp $ when the ticket is printed.

Do you even play machines, bro? I'm kidding a bit. However, depending on the casino, there are various maximums you can cash out on a machine. There are a few logical reasons for this. But anyway, if your ticket is like 3k you might have to go to the cage. This isn't a ruse on the part of the casino imo, and it is worth going to the cage for.

I'm not suggesting lower value tickets should get priority.

There is no honest reason for the coins to not be dispensed at the machines. They were for many years. Many casinos still do this. Ostensibly, the casino is poised to pay every patron the coins at the cage.

IMO, they have changed specifically to create a burden so that it is no longer worth it for customers to collect the money they are owed. Customers must waste time and energy for a return that is far below minimum wage in order to collect the money they are owed. And, it turns out, that many people do in fact decide it is not worth it to the tune of $22 million.

Thus my analogy. How would you like it if I owed you money, and I offered to pay, but only in a such a manner that it was not worth it to you to collect?

I do not know the law and have no idea what the legal results will be. But I hope MGM loses, whoever devised this scam is fired and we return to a system where customers are paid in full.

they're there primarily to save casinos money in not having to pay cashiers. Customers saving time is a happy byproduct.

Correct. So why would you expect the machines to be set up in a way that cost casinos money (by paying out change)?

Wonder where the sweet spot is for maximizing ev. Maybe they should cut giving out 1s as well.

Because they still need cashiers this way.

They're going to need cashiers regardless, for the table games.

Because they dont want the extra costs of this. Thats a good enough reason? They dont *have* to offer the quicker cash out, its a luxury and and incentive to customers.

In our local supermarket there are 16 self service tills, all of which are card only.

There are also 8 tills with staff that you can use to pay by cash.

Are we going to sue the supermarkets because they are making it longer to pay by cash?

Clearly. They will lose.

They can, by going to the cage.

So you believe that the casinos have done this to save the cost of placing coins in the machine and the millions and millions of dollars they don't have to pay to the people they owe is just a byproduct of that? If that's true, I'm sure Nick Vertucci has some real estate advice he'd like to sell you.

The super market comparison is way off. Firstly, the market does not owe me any money. I am trying to give them my money. You don't usually sue people because you have money that you would like to give to them. Outside of maybe a discrimination case.

Hang onto this though. If someone ever sues a casino because the casino comes up with some scheme to prevent customers from playing slots, maybe you can use it then.

I'm sure the market has reasons for how they distribute kiosks driven by the goal of getting people through quickly. They are not disabling a function on the kiosk to prevent customers from getting change.

Apples to apples would be just that. All your local supermarkets stop dispensing change at the kiosks. If you want your change, you have to walk to the other side of the market and stand in line for 10 minutes or more.

I'm honestly curious. At what point would you find this unacceptable? What if you had to drive to another location 10 miles away to get your 40 cents?

Ok, another analogy closer to your point.

You have $30.22 in your bank account which you want to withdraw. $30.00 of this you can spend 1 minute at a cash point (and you can choose any convenient cash point out of the hundreds of thousands that are available) however if you want the $0.22 you have to travel to the the bank and queue.

Are we now suing the bank because they dont provide the option to withdraw coins at ATMs?

No because it's your money and you still own it.

If you had to go into the bank, or else they would take the 22 cents and keep it for themselves, then you'd sue.

And similarly you're perfectly entitled to keep the ticket with the remaining cents on it which you still "own".

It's not similar at all. The ticket is a promise of money. The ticket has no value outside the casino. The money is money, which has value all kinds of places. You can spend it using a card or check or the bank will hold it for you. You own the money.

The tickets expire and then become worthless even in the casino, which then doesn't have to pay you what it owes and your money goes away and into their pocket, rather than staying in your possession, as the 22 cents in your bank account does.

If I write you an IOU and say "you are perfectly entitled to keep the IOU, which you still 'own,'" that doesn't do you much good. Nobody cares about the TITOs themselves. I find it hard to believe you don't know this.

These casinos are missing out on a golden opportunity for people to redeem their change for players club points directly at the machine. It's the same principle as your airline giving you the opportunity to buy points. Most people don't go to a casino and play 1 machine and leave. They play multiple machines, multiple times, often over multiple days, especially in vegas. 88 cents here and 60 cents there can add up to a lot comps for the player if the player were given the option to covert the change to points.

The money in your bank account is a promise that the bank will give you the money....

I find it hard that you think this lawsuit will go anywhere. Its a joke lawsuit and the only people who are going to make any money out of it are the lawyers.

To be fair, at some point you would lose that 22 cents in most banking accounts, if you never put anymore money into that account. Either because they have minimum deposit limits or fees that would be assessed either on a regular schedule or if there is no activity in the account.

I wouldn't. If it were up to the casinos every game would be rigged. They'd run an in-house loansharking operation and they'd comp rich patrons underage prostitutes. They'd beat up or kill people for legally winning money. That's why they need the law to keep them in line.

In casino it is also still your money. They give you a ticket that says they still owe you.

Exactly what I thought of, too.

"This sounds familiar."
"Yeah, they did it in Superman III."

I want to say it was PokerRoom, but there was a site that made you withdraw in whole dollars. (Or maybe it was Neteller that made you truncate to the nearest dollar.) So e.g. if you were deciding to cash out your last, say, $346.20, you'll pull $346 and say farewell to those two dimes. Of course, no individual person cared. At worst, you're giving up 99 cents.

However, when I cashed out for good, and I saw that I had left something like 14 cents behind with no way to get to it, I really DID think about Office Space and what the aggregate total of all of those pennies from all accounts were – plus accounts with really tiny balances that the user never bothered with. The sum total isn't huge, but it's not nothing, either. And I thought, if it's one guy who can pocket that for himself, no one would notice and yet he could probably buy himself something pretty damn sweet.