☰
Before the advent of ticket in ticket out slots, just about all casinos, big and small alike, had two count rooms for money: a “soft count” room for paper money and a “hard count” room to count coins. Do the casinos still have hard count rooms?
The short answer is no, though casinos certainly still count coins. All hard-money handling, including coins, remains part of casino cash logistics. However, the traditional hard-count room is almost non-existent.
The shift away from coin-operated slot machines began in the 1990s due to high maintenance costs, labor intensity, and the rise of ticket-in-ticket-out (TITO) systems. Back in the coin-in era, casinos had hard count rooms where slot attendants/security dumped hopper buckets, coins ran through mechanical or optical counters, and everything was logged, reconciled, and secured like a mini-Fort Knox. That all faded fast once TITO became standard in the early 2000s.
However, a handful of casinos around the country continue to offer coin-based slots for nostalgic appeal. And some very old tribal casinos or tiny locals properties still have a handful of coin-operated slot machines with small legacy coin-counting setups. Slots A Fun, as we know, has several dozen old-style coin machines, so the Phil Ruffin joint almost certainly has automated counting and batching equipment, including robotic sorters and/or automated coin sorters. Last we heard, some locals casinos, especially the smaller ones out in Henderson, still had some coin machines.
But on the Strip and in modern casinos around the country, coins are essentially gone.
In fact, greenbacks themselves are being phased out as casinos push toward cashless options. Like coins, cash will probably never go away entirely, but as we discussed in a recent QoD, the demand for this kind of money will no doubt follow coins into obscurity in the not-too-distant future.