In the late 90s, I worked for an amusement company that had operated since the 1960s and had just opened their final boss status family fun center in my neighborhood. Got to know the family really well, was a keyholding manager etc.

A lot of their business was machines on location, video games/pinball, jukeboxes, pool tables. Got to know not only the history, but the real ins and outs of the business. Redemption was the real bread and butter of the center. The value of a ticket from a redemption game was $0.01 at retail. The items were bought from wholesalers and generally marked up 3x, candy much higher. If you wanted to save your tickets for that really cool beer stein that was 6,000, to us, that meant $60 but was bought for about $15. The average game paid out 4.3 tickets per game or about $0.009 in redemption power.