Play Meter

PLAY METER: How would you evaluate the pool
table market today, from a manufacturer's point of
view?
MARCET: Even though it's felt that the pool table
market today is a replacement market, it doesn't
mean, from a manufacturing and distributing
viewpoint, that we can't do some real hard selling to
move more tables. Of course, some people would
look at the pool table market today and say it's a
no-growth situation, but I don't think that's the
case at all. Even though we may feel the pool table
market is, generally speaking, a replacement
market, we still feel there is something that
perhaps we could do in the future which would help
us turn this thing around.
PLAY METER: We have seen in the case of other
coin-op games where innovations, such as the
introduction of solid state technology, have helped
open the doors to more locations for more games.
Do you think it would take some innovations on the
product itself to open more locations to pool tables?
MARCET: First of all, I think that pinball and so
forth are just a little bit different from a pool table
in this area. But that doesn't mean I think
innovations won't come in the pool table market. I
think those innovations will come; and they will, no
doubt, help the whole market. But actually, with
what we've seen so far-with the attempts to
marry electronics to pool tables-hasn't really been
all that impressive. Yet, still, I think the electronics
field can offer some possibilities. One way in which I
think it might help us is that it could give the
operator a chance to price his pool games according
to time play, rather than on each individual rack of
fifteen balls. That is, electronics can make it so that
a player could actually buy time on a pool table,let's
say, something like fifty cents for ten minutes.
During that ten-minute span, the table would
return all the balls; but, after the time has elapsed,
the rack would close and capture all further balls
and players would have to buy more time. Exactly
how well something like that would work out and
whether or not it would actually increase earnings
is something I really don't know about. But it would
seem to be a genuine application of electronics. I
can see where good players would look upon it as a
bargain since they might be able to clear the table
in a shorter time and get in more games for the
same money than some rank beginner who fumbles
around and takes quite a while to clear the table.
PLAY METER: What other types of innovations do
you think might be able to open up more locations to
pool tables?
MARCET: Maybe something that would change the
size or format of the game. But I think actually you
would find these new types of pool tables would end
up going into the same types of locations that
already have pool tables. So I don't know if we're
really talking about opening up new types of
locations, although in the case of bumper pool, I
think you'll find that game opened the door for the
future sale of pool tables. But now we see that
bumper pool has been almost completely replaced
by regular six-pocket pool. You see, bumper pool
PLAY METER , October, 1979
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