Roger's got a suggestion on the interview page, but I'll post it here anyway.
"In my opinion, Pay the Rent is a mean, deceitful game as it is now played on the show. It tricks the player into losing bigtime. It is obvious that the most intuitive thing for a regular contestant to do in that game is to put the cheapest on the bottom and the most expensive on top. Unfortunately, for the contestant, it is purposely not set up that way by the producers Because of that deception the contestant loses. (We used to avoid tricking contestants as much as possible. I didn't like playing Double Prices with a fake price ending in a five and the real price ending in a two!).
If I was forced to revamp the game...rather than retire it...(revamping in lieu of retiring it because of all the money spent on the set piece)
Get rid of the $1000 prize for just putting an item in the first box...it is a meaningless win.
Since the game, in my opinion, is not really a "fun" game nor an especially interesting one, I would lower the top prize from $100,000 to $10,000 (or $20,000, depending on the budget). I would make the bailout option on level 3 much less. This also would allow the game to get into regular rotation.
One of the beefs I have with this game having such a big cash prize is that it took the thunder away from Plinko. Pay the Rent dethroned Plinko as the premiere cash game on the Price Is Right. Plinko (whether you like it or not) is a signature game of the show invoking excitement on its reveal, and, for long time viewers, nostalgia. Pay the Rent was not worthy of knocking Plinko down one level.
I would then make the game easier to win. I would study the possible permutations of grocery prices possibilities. Hopefully, there would be a way so that the cheapest one DOES go in the bottom box, and the most expensive one goes into the top position with the game still remaining somewhat challenging. It does not mean that the contestant would get it right, but at least the contestant would intuitively attempt to do it that way.
Thus, the objective for the contestant is 1) figure our what he thinks is the cheapest 2)figure out the correct combinations for the next two levels, and 3) place the item he thinks is the most expensive on the top level.
Yes, I realize that this is similar to placing items from cheapest to most expensive (as in Hole In One). The only difference is that the middle two levels require a combination of two prices. Many of our games are similar...one of our jobs at TPIR was to, as Jay Wolpert explained it to me, "throwing sand in people's faces so that they don't really realize the games are the similar"!"