But we’ve long known that the whole product is designed for addiction: the rapid-fire nature of the game that minimises any time you’d spend waiting to play (and potentially leaving), the music which showers you with victorious sounds even if the amount you’ve won is less than the amount you bet, the absence of clocks or windows to warp your perception of time, even the ergonomics of the seat to maximise customer inertia, I mean, comfort. Loading For years, we’ve had ex-pokies staff telling stories of how the Responsible Service of Gambling training that is compulsory in the hospitality industry has been treated like a joke in practice. Like Cassie Byrnes, who told SBS as far back as 2013 of a colleague who was almost sacked when a regular customer approached him saying she was out of cash. “Fresh out of RSG school, he said, ‘Well, maybe you should go home, or is there someone that I can get you to, like, get you some help?’ ” explained Byrnes. “And the person training him then went and told senior management, and, within like the space of just 30 seconds, I could see the duty manager marching down through the hallways of the poker machines and took him into a back room, and he just got an absolute grilling. It’s just not allowed.'' Remember all that, and Woolworths’ strategies begin to look mild, like an extremely well-honed (if slightly creepy) version of customer service – a kind of digitised adaptation of the cafe or bar staff who learn enough about you to make you feel like, and then become, a regular. It’s the kind of thing I could imagine a good telemarketing outfit dreaming up so they can casually charm us with banter about the local sports team while they upsell a new mobile phone plan. Viewed one dimensionally this is simply a perfectly legal business deploying perfectly clever techniques to maximise profit.

So, pokies venues have revenue targets for their staff. Doesn’t every business? So, they manipulate your environment and your experience to get you to stay longer. Isn’t that why supermarkets are laid out confusingly with the items we want at the back and the impulse buys along the way? Or why chic cafe menus drop the $ from the front of prices so we don’t feel the financial gravity? Or why soft drinks are sold to us in small cans (which we buy in larger numbers) and large chocolate blocks are called something like “family” size (which we eat by ourselves)? Companies are constantly manipulating our psychology for profit. Vulnerable people included. And we almost never care. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video If it’s different with pokies, if the Woolworths story makes us feel queasy, then we have to own up to what that means. We’re saying there is (or should be) something illegitimate about this business engaging in what are otherwise standard business practices. That they should somehow not be entitled to seek to maximise their profits as other businesses do. And if that’s true, then we really have to ask why it is we accept the whole enterprise in the first place. The only comparable examples are tobacco and alcohol, which are both too ingrained in our culture to eradicate, but which if they were newly invented products would probably struggle to become legal. But pokies aren’t culturally entrenched over centuries. This is not some essential, definitive element of Australian life. Pokies thrive because they are to us what guns are to America – except without even the thick political mythology of freedom and the constitution to justify them. Consider the similarities. Both are massive money spinners protected ultimately by the lobbying power and political donations of the companies that profit from them. Both respond to the damage they do with ideas that promise to be ineffectual: “give guns to teachers” or “customer education” and putting up signs in venues that say things like “Is gambling a problem for you?”. Both make arguments in their defence that are downright misleading, whether it be about soaring rates of knife crime where guns are restricted, or wildly inflated predictions of job losses if pokies are restricted, as is happening right now in the Tasmanian election campaign, where Labor is threatening to remove pokies from pubs.

Loading And both claim lives. A coroner’s report in Victoria showed 128 people had killed themselves in a space of a decade because of a gambling addiction. The National Council of Problem Gambling in America says one in five problem gamblers attempts suicide. And while it’s always hard to establish a direct causal link – it’s possible that people with mental health problems become problem gamblers rather than the reverse – there’s no doubt losing large amounts of money, and possibly their most significant social relationships as a result, is a key component. Maybe one day we’ll take this seriously – even America finally seems to be in a moment of sustained, visceral agitation on gun control. But I fear not. If only the victims of pokies were energised, teenage activists blessed with the power of American oratory. If only they weren’t older, more withdrawn, and easier for the rest of us to look down upon and blame for their plight. If only this self-inflicted disaster baffled and transfixed us as much as America’s ones do. Instead, we seem powerless to do anything about an obvious problem we well understand. And I don’t have a word for that, either. Waleed Aly is a Fairfax columnist and a presenter on The Project. Help is available at Gambling Help Online. Phone 1800 858 858