sorry if that came off as kinda short Mike, its just that this idea seems to come up like every 6 months or so and its always the same 'we only need to order 100K, that should be easy with so many chip nuts, we'd only need X people at X per set, etc etc'. So I'll just give the overview.
They won't do customs for retailers who are ordering over 100K in chips, so they sure aren't going to do it for us. Their lifeblood is the casino industry who demand and expect absolute security in their currency (aka chips). Paulson gives them that by not doing customs for the home market that look anything close to their chips. They make more than enough money from their casino customers that we don't matter to them. If we don't buy chips from them, they won't even feel it. And they will never put their casino customer relationship in jeopardy to cater to the home market. Its corporate suicide.
What few patterns we get (and there's only 3 right now, JB2005/Pharaohs/classics; NPS; Private Cardroom/tophat) are all they'll offer for 'custom' sets to the non-casino market. You can pick any 7 from those 21 chip combos (or maybe 8 if you ask REALLY nicely and spend more $$).
They won't do solids at all, we tried before doing the private cardroom chips. I ran the design effort for those chips here along with Nugzy, it was the first opportunity to do a hotstamp paulson set for the home market. That in itself took a little convincing. In the end, we settled on a pretty good design, but it didn't sell near 100,000 chips even with a good pre-sale price of about 75ish cents (give or take a penny or 2).
The top hat inlay was also designed here as was the suits mold they put it on. I believe we also helped pick the colors and patterns for that set too. And there was a lot of back and forth on it, half love this but hate that, the other half hate that but love this. In the end, I don't think they sold a lot up front either.
Now look at how hard it was for things like the Protege and the T-mold semi customs to come to somewhat of an agreement on colors and patterns. And agreement on the inlay for the Proteges. Also check the Sin City Showdown thread. You'll see that there's no one design (inlay AND/OR chip design) that will gather a consensus among enough people to cover 100,000 chips even IF they'd let you do it. And you'd have to come up with BOTH and inlay and chip design that satisfies everyone. It just won't happen, so that's hurdles #1 and #2 to overcome.
Next will be mold & inlay size. Many hate the grand mold (I do) and prefer the classic concentric circle mold. Others are just the opposite. Many hate giant inlays, others love them. How about denoms or no denoms? currency symbol or no currency symbol? Fractionals or no fractionals? Text or numeric denoms or both? If you lose 10% of those interested on each of these decisions, you're already down to a pretty small group.
Now, they'll most likely need $$ up front for this, lets say its just $25000. Is someone going to front that, or collect it from the buyers? Do you collect the entire amount of the order or just enough to cover the deposit? If its just the deposit, what happens when people back out (which does happen) and their order still needs to be paid for? Who is going to be trusted to collect that big sum of money be it $25K or $100K? Yes there was a lot of interest in that ritz set that MSPatton put up, but in the end everyone (except the buyer) was just window shopping and drooling over them like most of us do. Very few will drop that kind of money on a set of chips and even the buyer was only keeping half of it.
Lets look at the math just to see how insignificant we are. Paulson (GPI really) just reported revenues of $12
MILLION for the first 3
MONTHS of this year. Lets say that's they do a total of $40 Million in revenue for the year. What part of $40 Million is $100,000 (the rough cost of a custom order from us)? One QUARTER of a percent or 0.0025 So if I were to put that in money we all can relate to, since we're not multimillionaires
, that is a quarter out of a $100 bill. Is there any real difference to you if I give you $99.75 or $100? Or if I'm offering you 25 cents once and a group of guys is offering you $99.75 every year, but they may not if you take my quarter, are you going to be interested in my quarter?
Hopefully this puts it in perspective. People often say, how can they turn down a $100K order? That's a lot of money! Gotta look at it from their point of view, and when you do, its not a lot for what they'd risk (pissing off their bread & butter).
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