January 20, 1987 (#6342D)

[Chelsea]

[actual_retail_tice]

RARE OUTCOME ALERT: Grocery Game ends with the contestant not reaching $6.75.

[actual_retail_tice]

Also, I can only go on what I've seen on YouTube, tpirepguide.com, etc. but I have this theory that the producers decided to boost the budget of the showcases by quite a lot starting not too long before this episode. In this show's furniture showcase, we have a living room that has to be worth at least as much as a medium-priced car, because combined with a kiddie living room set and an electric keyboard, it comes out to over $13,000. Big bucks for 1987...there were still $6000 cars! This looks to be typical of the era; I can barely find any showcases from that time period under $10,000, and when they are, they are still much more expensive than typical furniture/trip showcases just a couple of years before.

[mellongraig]

Also rare that by this time, the models' wardrobe was not credited at the end of this episode. I wonder what wardrobe designer was given to them because it seemed to also pop up on the October 30, 1986 episode as well when Kyle filled in.

[pannoni1]

Also, I can only go on what I've seen on YouTube, tpirepguide.com, etc. but I have this theory that the producers decided to boost the budget of the showcases by quite a lot starting not too long before this episode. In this show's furniture showcase, we have a living room that has to be worth at least as much as a medium-priced car, because combined with a kiddie living room set and an electric keyboard, it comes out to over $13,000. Big bucks for 1987...there were still $6000 cars! This looks to be typical of the era; I can barely find any showcases from that time period under $10,000, and when they are, they are still much more expensive than typical furniture/trip showcases just a couple of years before.

Season 12 had quite a few sub-$5000 Showcases, but still, CBS raising their winnings cap to $50,000 and later $75,000 by this point meant that the door was open for more expensive prizes. More non-car games with prize packages above $3,000 were common as well, compared to the $1500-$3000 prize packages a few years earlier. Clock Game was the exception of course, which had sub-$2,000 prize packages until the $1,000 bonus was added over a decade later.

By this point, the SCSD win graphic had changed from the same graphic originally used on Grand Game since mid-season 12 to the Helvetica Italic font which lasted for about a year before reverting to a normal font until the "Star graphic" was introduced.

[Chelsea]

A few things are going on around this time and all of it factors in at least a little:

It's during the era where NBC was trying their DAMNDEST to grow its' daytime audience and was willing to occasionally throw money at their shows to fix it (when that failed, NBC shows became noticeably cheaper save the fixed-cost Super Password, and eventually, NBC would rapidly retreat from game shows pretty much the second Tartikoff left in 1991, only really trying one more time after that in '93)

Press Your Luck, singly and specifically, had forced CBS to finally abandon their winnings limit, opening the door for the rest of CBS Daytime to give away more money more often.

The show was 14, 15 years in - passing Squares in '86 and passing Concentration in Spring '87 to become the longest-lasting daytime game EVER.  Price's numbers were still strong but in a business where especially then old = bad, Price no doubt faced pressure to prove it still had a place and wasn't just some cheap 70s holdover giving away $6000 and a case of turtle wax

The show had gotten used to giving away bigger ticket items in the two nighttime versions pre-dating this point in the run (the Kennedy run often giving away very expensive prizes, especially in the showcase, during the first two thirds of its run, and the short lived CBS Primetime version having a large budget as well), so the staff had gotten used to the more expensive prizes. And since they still had the daytime numbers to justify it, it made the conversation about a bigger budget easier - and when CBS replaced Press Your Luck with nothing in Fall '86, that left several tens of thousands per week in the daytime budget that wasn't being spent on anything (remember that the budget doesn't just includes prizes but the staff as well)...so I wouldn't doubt in the slightest if Price wound up with a boost around this time.