Reflections on the Claw Game

And how fundraisers often get caught chasing oversized stuffed bananas.

If you’ve ever been to an arcade, you’ve seen the claw game. Early versions of the claw game asked the user to maneuver a tiny mechanical steam shovel over a sea of corn kernels and drop the shovel into the corn with the hope of filching out hidden silver dollars. The scheme was so popular - and lucrative - that by the 1950s the US Government considere…