Those of you who have younger children or grandchildren probably know what the Chuck E. Cheese experience is like. What you may not realize is the capitalist genius of the Chuckster. Chuck doesn’t make his money selling pizza pies. He makes his millions from trading in multiple currencies. Let’s walk through the Chuck E. Cheese experience and see just how easily the rat picks your pockets.

After you walk through the door, you proceed to the counter where you place your order for a little pizza and (most importantly) the game tokens! This is the first of Chuck’s currency trades. You give him your dollars and get back some nice shiny tokens. Then, you go take your seat to wait on your pizza. Of course, the whole time you are waiting, the kids are begging to go use those game tokens and you are faced with a major dilemma. You either let them go hit the games knowing that the pizza will be cold long before you ever get them back to the table. Or, you endure the constant bombardment of “can we go play the games now?” and make them wait and eat first. Either way, over the next hour or so your kids are running through those tokens like a hot knife through butter.

So you go and feed more dollars to Chuck’s little dollars to tokens conversion machine. All the while, Chuck is slowly converting your tokens into little paper tickets in his second currency trade. Your kids collect these tickets like manna from Heaven. A the end of the round of game play, you feed all these tickets into a machine and get a paper voucher showing the number of tickets you have. Then, you take this voucher to the prize counter where you can “purchase” your glorious prize. This is where Chuck’s final currency trade takes place, converting your paper tickets into little plastic trinkets.

Whew…the day of fun is now finally over and you walk out Chuck’s doors only to realize that the little plastic toys which your kids will play with for all of ten minutes just cost you sixty bucks. Yes, Chuck is one smart capitalist rat!