Collier’s Weekly: Finding Dozens of Claw-Machine Games in a West Mifflin Strip Mall

If you go into a certain storefront in West Mifflin, you will see people happily toting shopping baskets full of adorable plush figures.

Some are planning to leave with these stuffie armies, while others will trade them in for high-end collectibles — Japanese figurines or, yes, even Labubus. Most importantly, all of these have been won rather than purchased; like the plunder earned during a trip to Chuck E. Cheese’s or the Kennywood arcade, these are prizes rather than mere toys.

This storefront, in an unassuming strip mall, houses Get a Grip Clawcade, an arcade entirely dedicated to claw machines. Once designed simply to fill a child’s attention for a few minutes outside a restaurant or movie theater, claw games have risen in popularity on social media and thanks to the influence of Jap