Kotaku ran a story today discussing a small shop in Hampshire Illinois called Name Your Game where they sold items like clothes and candy and they had a small collection of arcades there which brought in a bit of business. Unfortunately the city decided that it wanted a piece of the pie from any arcades in their zone and enforced new taxes (which they called “fees”) on arcades in the city, which proved to be too burdensome for
The owner of Name Your Game
the small business in question and they had to pull the games.
It’s unfortunate that this is still going on in some cities and it is still common to find such burdens placed upon arcades in many cities in the US and elsewhere – most are holdovers from the old days when arcades could be found everywhere. When I opened my own arcade last year I shopped around the different cities to see who would treat my business the best in this regard. While I could have gone to a city with a higher earning population, I choose not to as the fees they would apply on machines in that city would have been too great for me to bear, especially starting out. In the case of the business in this story, called I think it provides and excellent case for why this sort of thing does not work (which I also think can be applied to new tobacco taxes coming down the pipe). If you punish business, the economy will not prosper – we should have learned that lesson in the Great Depression but sadly most people forget or ignore history and repeat the same mistakes over and over again (on a reverse note, if you reward failures like we have been doing with bailouts, that will end up to be a dismal failure as well – free markets are about sorting out the winners from the losers and without that occuring, it will just cause more problems, in addition to the crushing debt we are letting ourselves get into).
Anyways, enough political ranting for now, I know that’s not what you come here for. I do hope that things can turn around for Name Your Game, perhaps the city will backtrack on their policy at one point or loosen it a bit. Hit the link below for the original source.
[Video Game Tax driving teens from their Hideout – The Courier News] [Discuss on the Forum]
