A few weeks back my buddy Ed texted me a photo of one of those big old
scales that you might come across at a boardwalk
and asked “Why are these popular? Why do people pay a quarter to weigh themselves?”
It was a great question. I had seen these countless times over the years
and while it seemed obvious that they were an older amusement,
I still wondered why they were ever an amusement to begin with.
They’re called penny scales, and while the later incarnations cost more,
they were named penny scales because you’d pay a penny to weigh yourself. They were originally
a product of Germany, and they made their way over to the United States in the 1880s.
At around the same time over in England, the first modern vending machines were starting to show up.
So whether it was for your weight or a pack of gum the idea of inserting a coin
into an unmanned machine and getting something in return was fairly new.
What drove the popularity of these automated coin-operated scales in particular?
Well, the short answer is that weighing yourself in the late 1800s was a novel concept. Healthcare
had made great strides in the late 19th century, but it still wasn’t anywhere close to the point
where people were regularly going to the doctors for preventative care. You usually only went to
the doctor when you were sick, and like, really sick. And at that point nearly three quarters
of the US population lived in rural areas where house calls were common. So unless you
happened to be going to the doctor instead of the other way around, it wasn’t entirely common
for doctors to weigh people unless that person’s weight was thought to be a key to their illness.
All that to say, if you were walking around a boardwalk in the late 1880s with a penny in
your pocket, there was a pretty good chance that you genuinely didn’t know how much you weighed.
Here comes this new machine that offers that information. No doctor visit. No getting
sick. Just finding out a little bit about yourself through a new technical marvel.
Now back then a penny had the same purchasing power of about 30 cents today. So even then,
a penny to hop on the scale wasn’t much money,
and it was that affordable price that allowed the popularity of the penny scale to keep growing,
even decades later throughout the Great Depression.
Over time manufacturers of the scales kept things fresh and interesting by changing up the way they
worked. They began to notice that some potential customers were shying away from the scales
because they didn’t want complete strangers who were walking by to see how much they weighed.
So instead of having the weight displayed for all to see,
newer scales began to print the weight on a card for the user. Along with their weight, the card
usually offered a horoscope or a fortune. Some were collectible cards with celebrities on them.
These cards also managed to change the business model of the penny scale. Prior to the change,
scale owners had to send out collectors whose job was to go from machine to machine to collect all
the pennies, give the location owners their cut, and then bring the rest back to the scale owner.
With the implementation of printed cards, the scale owners simply sold the cards to the location
owners at a rate of about 80 cents per 100 cards. That way the scale owner made their money upfront,
avoided having to send out collectors, and just let the location owners deal with all the pennies.
Eventually, an element of gambling was introduced to the scales.
One scale design had three coin slots on it. All three would allow people to weigh themselves,
but one of the three would spit out their penny at the end as a prize. Frank Westbrook, founder of
the Peerless Weighing Machine Company of Detroit took credit for the idea, calling back to a time
he was stuck waiting for a train and passed the time by both weighing himself and getting
conned by a penny slot machine, before planning a machine that would do both at the same time.
Other models let users guess their weight first, and if they were right they’d have
their penny refunded to them. These tricks, to put it simply, worked.
By 1927 it was reported that 40,000 penny scales were spread across the United States
and that they were being used up to 500 million times a year.
That amounted to $5 million in revenue, which today adjusted for inflation,
would be a $78 million a year industry. That company from before, Peerless Weighing,
controlled an estimated 35% of the industry at that point with over 14,000 machines.
So what happened to the Penny Scale? As is often the case, a number of factors came into
play. The most obvious was that the novelty of being weighed began to wear off. With advances
in medicine, doctor visits became more common, and people’s weights became less of a mystery.
On top of that, the advancements in coin-operated amusements made the scale look
kind of boring. Coin-operated pinball and other games began to spring up.
There was simply better uses of the money.
Most importantly, though, it was another new product that was imported from Germany
that helped kill off the penny scale: the bathroom scale. By purchasing a bathroom scale,
people didn’t need to shell out money every time they wanted to weigh themselves. Yeah,
it didn’t spit out horoscopes, but it allowed users to weigh themselves in
the privacy of their own home as much as they wanted, whenever they wanted.
Today you can usually still find the odd Penny Scale here or there if you look hard enough.
They remain as a relic from a time where people were willing to shell out some money
to play with a new device, not to mention learn a little bit more about themselves.