Q:
Every time I visit Las Vegas I wonder how many eggs does this town go through in one day. I eat more breakfasts when I'm in Vegas than when I'm home. I never think about it until I am there, and then it becomes an obsession thinking about the number of eggs the city must use. Do you have any idea?
A:
We can't say we'd given it much thought until you raised the subject, but that's the whole joy of QoD. You piqued our curiosity, plus we couldn't bear the thought of you obsessing for another moment, so we had to find out.
According to an article we came across by the Egg Nutrition Center, the peak of U.S. egg consumption was in 1945 with a per capita intake of 405 eggs per person per year. That equates to 7.8 eggs per week or 1.1 eggs per day. Today's intake is more like 244 eggs per person per year or 4.7 eggs per week, 0.7 eggs per day.
We assume your question refers essentially to the hotel-casinos' egg usage -- a quick poll of the LVA staff confirmed that we residents seem to be fairly conservative in our egg consumption, with those who responded to the internal survey eating an average of 3.1 eggs per week (minus those slipped into our diet via cakes, bagels etc., which are harder to account for on an individual basis).
As far as the casinos are concerned, we embarked on one of our legendary call-arounds and encountered far less surprise or suspicion than we'd anticipated (eggs are evidently less controversial than beer -- see QoD 10/28/07). We confess, we didn't call every single casino to get an eggs-act figure, but we did survey a good (free) range and hope that our findings will enable you to draw good enough conclusions to sleep (over) easy once more. (Sorry, just couldn't help ourselves.)
Here's what we learned from all the very helpful food buyers we spoke with:
- The Hard Rock, which has 647 guest rooms and five restaurants, gets through 2,256 dozen eggs a month, on average, which equates to 27,072 individual eggs per month, or roughly 900 per day.
- Downtown's Golden Gate (which, as per the 5/8/07 QoD, we can confirm also gets through 54 pounds of large shrimp and 217 pounds of Bay tiddlers), gets through 15 cases of eggs per week. It's 30 dozen eggs to a case so you do the math. Oh, all right, we will: That's about 771 eggs per day.
- Hooters fries, whisks, boils, and scrambles 80 dozen -- 960 -- eggs a day.
- Over at the Gold Coast it's around 1,800 dozen per week, so that's a whopping 3,086 per day or so, on average.
- With over 3,300 guest rooms, Caesars Palace, who even asked if we needed the breakdown between boiled, fried, and so on (they sounded relieved that we didn't), gets through approximately 93,000 eggs per month. So, at about 3,067 per day, that's actually less than the 711-roomed Gold Coast, interestingly enough. But then Caesars doesn't offer a whole range of egg 'n' something graveyard specials, so that probably accounts for it.
- Bally's came up with a figure of just over 5,000 eggs a day. Whoaa, that's a lot of omelets.
- With a turnover of approximately 2,000-2,200 dozen per week, South Point's daily egg consumption works out around the 3,600 figure.
- Sam's Town, which has 646 guest rooms and serves 24-hour-a-day breakfasts and $4.99 ham 'n' egg/steak 'n' egg specials in the coffee shop, gets through approximately 120 cases each of medium and large eggs per month, so that's 240 cases in total, with 30 dozen eggs to a case, or around 2,880 eggs per day.
OK, enough already. Any more and we'll be put off drinking our special Ellis Island eggnog, and that would never do.
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