PHOTO BY SEAN COLLIER

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 Japanese and Korean arcade trends. Now, they are a genre unto themselves, several varieties of which are on display at Get a Grip.

The storefront arcade, which bills itself as the to be the first such business in the area, celebrated its first birthday last weekend, mainly houses traditional claw machines: You put a token in the slot, then try to grab a stuffed animal and drop it in the prize chute. The twist here is that you can trade up (again, like with prizes at Kennywood), exchanging stuffies for prizes like collectibles, anime and video-game gear or … much larger stuffies.

These premier prizes aren’t impossible to obtain, either; you can trade as few as five or 10 small prizes for some impressive stuff (or even exchange single stuffies for boxes of candy). There’s no impossible barrier like you would find at old-school arcades, where video games and electronics were on tantalizing display for tens of thousands of tickets; with skill and determination, you could walk out of Get a Grip in an hour with a nice reward or two in hand.

Other games offer richer rewards for variations on the claw-machine model, like using the claw to roll a giant die or hooking a tiny loop onto a line. (The latter game, probably the hardest in the arcade, is the one that rewards the determined player with the coveted Labubu prizes.)

I had a good time at Get a Grip, winning a pair of stuffed animals — a smiling cappuccino and a bear that was dressed up in a bee costume — after spending about $20. (You can pay for tokens with cash or card, and larger token purchases grant bonus plays, as is the norm at most modern arcades.)

Mostly, though, I was simply happy that the arcade exists. Strip malls, once centers not only of commerce but of recreation for suburban America, have become purely functional in the last couple of decades; you’re more likely to find an urgent-care clinic or a tattoo-removal spot than an arcade or a bookstore in most places like these. Get a Grip, on the other hand, is exactly what is most needed in the suburbs: a place to go for more than five minutes, where guests do more than merely shop and meet needs. It’s an escape for whimsical adults and a boon for neighborhood parents looking for something close by and (relatively) inexpensive.

At this point, I’m happy with anything that isn’t just another vape shop. Especially if I can walk out having won a smiling cappuccino.