The Wonder of Caine's Arcade

Caine’s Arcade isn’t the first small business that has benefited from social media.  It certainly won’t be the last.   But there is something so enchanting about this Cinderella story that it has touched hearts around the world.  Maybe it's the energy of the 9-year-old owner.  Maybe it's the homemade product, built from duct tape and cardboard.  Maybe it reminds each of us of the magic of being young.  How we played, imagined and dreamed. 

I got shivers watching this video.  Caine's Arcade Video

9-year-old Caine used his summer vacation and the space in his father’s auto body shop to create his own arcade out of the extra cardboard and scraps from the shop.  Opening up “Caine’s Arcade” to the public proved to be a challenge because customers were hard to come by.  As fate has it, his long-awaited first customer, Nirvan Mullick, is a filmmaker and was so taken with Caine’s creative business that he set out to bring it new life.  Through Facebook groups like Hidden LA, Nirvan rallied so much interest in Caine’s story that it ended up on the front page of Reddit.  The support was overwhelming and Nirvan organized a surprise flash mob to go to Caine’s Arcade.  His short film that captures the flash mob has blown up online, tallying over two million views on Vimeo and Youtube in two days.

What is it about the story that so moves us?  

It’s Caine’s sense of wonder, his ingenuity, his resourcefulness and his passion.  These represent elements of life that make any business better, and that’s what they did for Caine.  His story gives us tangible examples of these characteristics, with touches of youth naiveté that are simply charming.

I want to look a little closer at my personal favorite aspect of Caine’s Arcade, his Fun Cards.  I really love the parameters he put on them.

The whimsical pricing strategy: How’s this for a customer incentive to ‘trade up’.  $1 for 4 games (single purchase) or $2 for 500 games (Fun Card) 

They are time sensitive: The Fun Card expires one month from purchase.  Just another detail that is wonderful.

Fun Card Verification system: Obviously put into place so that no one who comes in with a falsified Fun Card can get away uncaught.  Each pass has a code on the back that corresponds to the square root of that Pass’s PIN number.  A calculator is duct taped to each machine so that Caine himself can verify the card’s authenticity before usage.   

He really has thought of everything.  

How about you, what’s you’re favorite part of Caine’s story?