Leisure Card Limited
The actual name of the company I joined after being made redundant with the closure of Camden was 'Shop-A-Long Bingo'. Honest! It was a chain of high street bingo parlours and the similarity with early Camden days is not just coincidence, brothers Mark and Wyatt Stanley who ran Shop-A-Long with their father Elias were old customers of the Baileys. It was Mark Stanley who contacted me and offered me a job to design a prize bingo system using IBM-PCs (we actually used the very first Taiwanese compatibles to be imported).
I used Microsofts QuickBASIC language to program the pc's and it all worked wonderfully at the bingo parlour on the Alum Rock road in Saltley (now an Asian fabrics retail outlet) and also on the Bristol Road in Northfield (still a bingo parlour but under different management).
Leisure Card Limited was set up by Wyatt Stanley to run separately from the bingo business. Wyatt had many ideas and inventions and came up with the original idea of using petrol station vouchers as loyalty cards where points accumulated could be exchanged at participating retail outlets. He originally approached BP with the idea but they rejected it. A year later oddly enough they introduced the very first collaboration with them and Argos whereby points could be collected on loyalty cards and then exchanged for goods.. funny that!!!
Another system designed by Wyatt involved replacing brass tokens won from fruit machines with electronic cards (like credit cards). The basis of the idea was that an electronic card could only be re-played into machines owned by the company that issued the card whereas brass tokens were subject to migration to other outlets which was a big problem for the gaming industry back then (I worked here from 1986 to 1992). Unfortunately the gaming board were guilty of giving the Stanleys the run-a-round with this idea - encouraging it's very expensive development until eventually (and when the Stanley brothers had run out of money) the gaming board (BACTA) did away with tokens altogether (fruit machines now pay out only cash).
I left Leisure Card again through redundancy in 1992 to work for Fluematic Limited
This page was last edited 06/06/2007
