Atlantic City's Cling Clang!

From Wayne Parry at the Associated Press:
It used to be the signature sound of gambling: the clacking of coins spilling into metal trays on slot machines. But newer electronic machines that spit out paper vouchers or credit winnings to cards emit only canned noise. Now, Atlantic City's oldest casino is bringing back the real clang amid indications that some gamblers miss the way things used to be. "You think you're playing a real slot machine here," said Jeanette Snell of Union, who won two $25 jackpots less than five minutes after she started playing yesterday at Resorts Atlantic City. "This feels like a game," she said. "The other ones, it's just losing money." Snell cashed out soon after the 47 dollar coins spilled into a metal tray at the bottom of her machine. She grabbed one of the oversize plastic cups that used to be everywhere in this gambling resort and scooped up her winnings. "This is real money," she said. "I like this better." Resorts is banking on others liking it, too. It became the nation's first legal casino outside Las Vegas when it opened in 1978 and has seen more than 14,000 slot machines come and go. Its coin experiment is swimming against the tide in the casino industry, where nearly 90 percent of the 900,000 or so slot machines in use in North America do not accept or pay out in coins. None of Atlantic City's 33,010 other slots uses coins, though a handful use tokens for high-denomination bets. The trend accelerated in 2003 when the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa opened as Atlantic City's first coinless casino. Casinos liked that the machines didn't jam as often, had to be maintained far less, and, best of all, required fewer employees. No longer was it necessary to pay workers to stock machines with coins, transport them to or from cash cages, and count and roll them. "It's very time-consuming and costly to run coins," said Christopher Downey, Resorts' director of slot operations. "As soon as this technology became available, the industry grabbed onto it." Resorts opened eight of the coin machines this week and will add more if they catch on. The casino, with one of the oldest customer bases in the city, has been doing well with a nightclub called Boogie Nights, where disco rules. It used the '70s Boogie Nights theme for the slot machines as part of a deliberate appeal to older players. Some of them gamble at the Skyline Restaurant & Casino in Henderson, Nev., where half of the 420 slots take coins. Those machines generate about 15 percent more revenue than do the paper-voucher ones, said general manager Mike Young. "It fills a niche, particularly for the older player," he said. "They like to get their hands dirty, they like to cash out, they like to hear the money drop into the trays."