It’s one thing to tout a company’s product line as best in its class. It’s quite another to back-up a claim through rigorous testing.
For nine weeks in late 2020, Gary Platt Manufacturing tested its claim that one of its products, the Gary Platt Sonoma Bench, positively impacted time on device and coin in during slot play.
“For years, we’ve heard anecdotal stories from slot directors and table games directors around the world that players do spend more time in our chairs and then more time on their games,” says Gary Platt CEO Joe Esposito. “We wanted to take that anecdotal evidence as a theory and put it to a live test, doing what we could to validate that claim.”
The test was conducted on two banks of similarly themed slot machines at a casino in the Reno, Nevada area. One section used Sonoma bench chairs, another used a competitor’s furniture.
“We ran two six-week tests off two different games,” Esposito reports. “In each case, we took two games that were right next to each other, used both chairs, ran the test for three weeks, got the results, switched the chairs to the other games for three weeks and got the results.”
Esposito adds that the company was confident the test would favor the Gary Platt chairs.
The results confirmed the perceptions of casino personnel: Slot machines with Gary Platt chairs had an 11% coin in increase and a 3% increase of time on device.
“We were obviously pleasantly surprised,” Esposito says. “Based on anecdotal evidence and things we’ve seen in the past, we expected to see a 3 to 5% increase in the area. The fact that we got a 3% increase in session time and 11% in coin in was certainly extremely favorable. We were very pleased with the results.”
Esposito notes that the results at one casino don’t necessarily mean all casinos will produce the same outcomes. Nor does the company claim that if casinos used Gary Platt chairs exclusively, there would be a global coin in increase of 11%.
“But we know in a relatively small environment, they’re going to pick our chair,” Esposito says. “The bottom line is, even if you have a 1% increase (of coin in), it would more than pay for the chairs in less than one year.
“And again, I want to preface the results by saying it’s a vacuum. It’s a small sample size. But certainly, it’s a very productive sample size that shows that people will not only spend more time at a spot, but they’ll also put more money in a game.”
