Chuck E. Cheese: Where a Kid Can Gamble Like an Adult
What with all the flashing screens, dinging bells, and glazed-over customers absorbed in the games at hand, a Chuck E. Cheese arcade bears quite a resemblance to the slot machine section of a casino. Are kids, in fact, gambling in between their pizza and soda?
Thanks to new legislation in Florida targeting Internet café sweepstake gambling operations, there’s an argument to be made that some Chuck E. Cheese games involve gambling and are therefore illegal. Since kids are the chain’s main clientele, that’s a problem for more reason than one.
Many states have cracked down on Internet café gambling in recent years. Last summer, the Wall Street Journal reported on the efforts in places such as Ohio, South Carolina, and Michigan to shut down—or at least regulate—these cafes, which are filled with simulated slot-machine games and often operate totally out in the open in strip mall locations. While the games vary, most involve plastic swipe cards that are purchased by customers and give users a certain number of “sweepstakes” entries in games of chance played on video screens. The games, which offer cash prizes, have been especially popular among the elderly. “It has become my world,” one 70-year-old woman told the WSJ while inside her neighborhood gambling café in Ohio.
Such Internet cafes began appearing in Massachusetts in large numbers around 2009, and in the summer of 2011, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley affirmed that these operations were illegal. “This kind of activity, gambling, is not allowed under Massachusetts law,” Coakley said at the time, according to the Boston Globe. “They are totally unregulated, there’s no oversight, and there is no protection for the consumer.”
Read more: http://business.time.com/2013/05/14/chuck-e-cheese-where-a-kid-can-gamble-like-an-adult/#ixzz2TMPH4hFQ
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