Nope. We never got the Wii Fit.

If you’re wondering why not, the answer is simple: time. By the time we’d saved up the thirty-thousand ticket purchase price, the item was no longer available in the Prize Area. Which actually turned out fine. As fate would have it, we’d gone out and bought one anyway a couple years prior.

But now we needed a new goal. Something else big to shoot for. Except there really wasn’t anything good to be had for less than one hundred thousand tickets. And at our current savings rate, that wouldn’t be for another two decades, at least.

Realizing this could go on forever, the kids decided to finally cash in some change for one of the few medium-sized prizes. Around 2011 or 2012, Sarah got a panini maker and Rachel got a snow cone machine. And they both used them! It was almost like this expensive, decade-long endeavor was paying off! The purchases put a dent in the savings, of course. The one hundred thousand ticket prizes were now likely thirty years away, but it didn’t matter because we really weren’t saving up for anything anyway.

About two weeks ago, we embarked on our most recent annual trip. Yep, everyone’s out of school, but for any family members and/or friends who happen to be in town in August right before school starts, it’s still an option.

But this year I finally started doing some of the math. To get a prize, you need tickets, and to get tickets you have to play games, and to play games, you have to buy a game card. So what was the exchange rate…? How close was all of this to one of my many favorite scenes from Steve Martin’s The Jerk?

Frosty, I’m no good at this.

Aw, come on Navin, you’re doing fine.

I’ve already given away eight pencils, two hoola dolls and an ashtray. And I’ve only taken in fifteen dollars.

Navin, you have taken in fifteen dollars and given away fifty cents worth of crap, which gives us a net profit of fourteen dollars and fifty cents.

Ah! It’s a profit deal! Takes the pressure off! Get your weight guessed right here! Only a buck! Actual live weight guessing! Take a chance and win some crap!

Calculating the exact ratio is going to be difficult. It’s like buying airline tickets. Maybe it’s $99 on one day, and maybe it’s $899 the next. But we can go with some reasonable averages.

A twenty dollar game card gives the player one hundred “chips.” Meaning, a single chip costs twenty cents.

A single play on an individual game can cost anywhere from one to seven chips or more. In real dollars, that’s maybe anywhere from a quarter to a buck fifty to play. The payout varies wildly, anywhere from zero tickets to 1,000 tickets for a big wheel-of-fortune type game. (Let me tell you, when you’re used to games spitting out 20 or 40 tickets after a play, winning a cool grand makes you feel like some sort of Vegas high roller.)

So at the end of a good evening, I would say the two twenty-dollar cards we bought fetched — oh, let’s call it — two thousand tickets. That’ll make the math a lot easier. In short, about two cents per ticket. Now! What kind of buying power do those two thousand tickets have?

Those top-tier, 100K ticket items are things like the Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch. All of those, new, cost around $300. So this is the figure I use for the exchange rate. If 100K tickets gets you $300 in real world booty, then you can multiply any prize cost by 0.003 to find the rough, real world dollar average. Let’s take a look:

Wow. To think that huge, one-thousand-ticket payoff on the big wheel-of-fortune game (which probably cost $1.50 to spin) ends up being about $3 in the prize payoff. “Step right up and win some crap!”

And for the real kicker: that $40 in game play fetching us 2,000 tickets translates to $6 in buying power. “Ah! It’s a profit deal!”

Navin R. Johnson would be so happy here.

Now, the math I refuse to do is taking our current ticket balance of around 42,000 and figuring out how many game cards we bought to make that happen.

Oh, who am I kidding. Of course I did the math. 42,000 tickets at $0.02/ticket is $840. While seeing that total (which, in reality, is likely much more) comes with a small shock value, that really isn’t the point. Set aside that this is a seventeen-year total, the real point isn’t that the money is solely converted to crap-we-don’t-need. It’s to get out of the house, spend some time together, play games and have fun as we wander among the sounds and lights.

And, most of all, to make sure I get a blog post out of it.

Done!