Unfortunately, Canada lost to Morocco today, so we’re out of the FIFA competition. That said, I went for a walk through the Granville area to see if people were still celebrating. Interestingly, the city has extended the car-free zone because local businesses reported making strong revenue and wanted to keep the momentum going.
Whether it stays that busy now that the games are over remains to be seen. What caught my attention were the carnival-style games set up along the street. One in particular stood out: for ten dollars, you could challenge yourself to hang from a bar for a hundred seconds to win a hundred dollars. At first, lots of confident, muscular people stepped up. Almost all of them failed. The trick is that the bar actually spins, making it much harder to keep your grip than it looks. Most people grabbed it like a regular chin-up bar and quickly lost control.
It made me think about how these games play on people’s emotions and overconfidence. You see an easy opportunity to win ten times your money and jump in without noticing the small but critical….that spinning bar. It’s a good reminder that when creating business opportunities, especially in high-traffic festive environments, success often comes from understanding human psychology better than customers do. People see what looks easy and don’t look closer.
It raises an interesting question: is it smarter to make money by capitalizing on people’s greed and tendency to overlook details, or by selling art or putting on a street performance? The carnival game approach feels more straightforward and reliable for many because it directly taps into that lottery-ticket mindset. As long as the rules are clearly stated, you could argue it’s fair game. Most people just don’t bother reading them as they assume it’s easy money.