Pinballs Store Is Coming to America — Closer to the Heart of Pinball

Pinball was born in America. The machines we spend our days bringing back to life — the Gottlieb System 80s, the Williams System 7s, the Ballys — rolled off assembly lines in Chicago. Every board we build is, in a sense, a letter written back to where it all started.

This autumn, we're delivering that letter in person. Pinballs Store is opening a US-based shipping station.

Why we're crossing the Atlantic

For years, our workshop in France has shipped boards to collectors in Texas, Ohio, California and everywhere in between. We've watched those packages disappear into international freight and hoped they'd arrive quickly, intact, and without a customs bill waiting at the door.

Too often, they didn't. A GottFA80_Plus that leaves our bench on Monday shouldn't take three weeks to reach a workshop in Missouri. A collector shouldn't pay a surprise import fee on a €99 driver board. And when someone writes to us with a machine down and a question, they shouldn't wait until European business hours for an answer.

We built this company because we love these machines. The distance was never part of the plan — it was just the reality of where we happened to be standing. So we're changing it.

What a US shipping station actually means for you

📦 Days, not weeks

Domestic transit instead of international freight. Orders that used to spend two or three weeks crossing an ocean and clearing customs will ship from within the United States and arrive in a matter of days.

💵 Lower shipping costs

Transatlantic postage is expensive, and that cost has always been baked into what you pay. Shipping a board from a US warehouse to a US address costs a fraction of what it costs to fly it across the Atlantic — and that difference goes back to you.

🚚 Free shipping options and paid overnight delivery

Once inventory sits on American soil, free shipping becomes genuinely viable rather than a promise we'd lose money keeping. And when your machine is down and you need the part tomorrow, paid overnight delivery becomes an option we can actually offer.

🛡️ No customs, no import fees, no held packages

This is the one we're happiest about. No customs declarations. No import duties. No package sitting in a facility somewhere while paperwork gets sorted. A domestic order is simply a domestic order.

🏷️ Sales and promotions that make sense for US buyers

Running a discount on a product that carries €40 of international shipping and an unpredictable customs charge was always a half-measure. With US-based stock, a 15% launch offer means 15% off — not 15% off before three other costs land on top.

↩️ Returns that don't cross an ocean

If something isn't right, you'll have a domestic address to send it back to. That's a meaningfully different experience from international returns paperwork.

Closer to the heart of pinball

There's a practical case for all this, and we've just made it. But there's a second reason, and it matters just as much to us.

The American pinball community is the beating heart of this hobby. It's where the machines were designed and built. It's where the biggest shows happen, where the deepest collections live, where the most stubborn restoration projects get attempted in garages and basements every weekend. Being an ocean away from that has always felt like reading about a conversation instead of being in it.

We want to be in the room. We want to hear directly what's breaking, what's working, and what people wish existed. Some of our best product decisions have come from a customer email describing a problem we hadn't considered — and we want a lot more of those conversations.

Meet Haley — our new manager

Making an American chapter real requires someone American. Haley, Missouri-born, now leads management and customer service for Pinballs Store. She's the person on the other end when you write in, the one chasing down a difficult order, and the reason this expansion has a plan behind it rather than just enthusiasm.

Practically, it means support in your time zone and a shorter path between "I have a question" and "it's sorted."

Come find us at Pinball Expo — Chicago, October 2026

We'll be at Pinball Expo in Chicago this October, and we'd genuinely love to meet you.

Come put a face to the emails. Ask Valère the technical question you've been sitting on for months. Get hands-on with a GottFA80_Plus or a Lisy80 before you buy one. Challenge Valère to a game if you're feeling confident — he's been playing since he was a kid, so consider yourself warned.

And stop by the booth for a chance to walk away with a Pinballs Store product of your own.

Tell us what you want to see

This expansion is happening because of the people who kept ordering from a small French workshop despite the shipping times. So we're asking directly:

• Which of our boards has saved a game for you?
• Which machine are you fighting with right now?
• What board, kit, or part do you wish we made?

Write to us. We read every message, and more than a few of our products started life as a customer's suggestion.

👉 Get in touch with the Pinballs Store team

What's next

The US shipping station opens this autumn. Pinball Expo follows in October. We'll post updates here as each step becomes real — including the exact launch date and what stock will be available stateside from day one.

Thanks for keeping these forty-year-old machines alive with us. We're looking forward to doing it a lot closer to home.

— Valère & Haley, Pinballs Store