Chuck E. Cheese Redemption

Chuck n' Trump

Cheese!

Ponder this. You must be 21 to gamble on the floor of a Las Vegas casino. Yet you don’t even need to be house-trained to gamble on the floor of a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant.

The Chuck E. Cheese business model has always fascinated me. As a child, there was something almost magical about it: the lights and sounds, the fun games, the unyielding drive to collect tickets, getting prizes, begging your parents for “just one more quarter”. This drive was undeniably a gambling-complex — one that was directly aimed and marketed toward children. Now in truth my uncle taught me Blackjack when I was 5, so those feelings weren’t new to me. But I still bought in.