We're aware of two experts in the field of casino carpeting. By day, Dr David Schwartz is Director of the Center for Gaming Research at UNLV. However, for several years now, one of his side passions has been the photographic chronicling of the nation's casino carpets, which he has compiled into an extensive online gallery at his DieIsCast.com blog. He was, however, unable to answer this question when we posed it to him a couple of years back.
A more recent arrival on the casino-carpet enthusiast's circuit was Chris Maluszynski, a photographer who moved to the U.S. from Stockholm seven years ago and first became distracted by gaudy shagpile when sent to Las Vegas to cover the World Series of Poker. Having studied and photographed them for awhile, Maluszynski came to the conclusion that Vegas casino carpets fall into three categories: many of them are geometric: dots, orbs, metastasizing lattices (think Aria, Fitzgeralds, Westin). Then, there are what Maluszynski calls "the organic ones," which feature curvilinear elements: underwatery ripples in turquoise and cobalt, gilded tendrils that seem to be derived from plants (Monte Carlo, Golden Nugget, Stratosphere, Wynn). Some of the themed hotels had themed carpets – the Luxor used to have sphinxes and New York-New York once had subway tokens in the design, for example. Maluszynski even had a show, "Feared and Loathed: The Carpets of Las Vegas," at the 25CPW gallery, on Central Park West in New York City, but we were unable to track him down to pose this question when we last tackled it, back in 2010, so we had to turn elsewhere. We'll get to that in a moment, but first a little more about the carpets themselves.
As to why casinos employ those notoriously busy patterned floor coverings, there are a number of explanations and theories. The hectic, multi-colored design approach is good for hiding dirt, spills, and cigarette burns in heavily trafficked areas. There's also a theory that the traditionally wildly patterned carpets are such an assault on the visual senses that they also encourage people to look up – at the machines and table games – rather than at the floor, and also disorient you and make it easier to become confused and lost on the labyrinthine casino floor if you're trying to make your escape. There can even be some superstition involved – Wynn and Encore feature a lot of red in the carpets, not least because red's a good-luck color in many Asian cultures.
As indicated above, finding the answer to your specific question proved trickier than we'd imagined, and we went around in a few circles before finally hitting the jackpot in the form of a 20+-year carpet veteran, who regularly works with hotels all over Las Vegas and was just finishing up a job with Aria when we tracked him down.
His explanation was the same as with so many things in life, in that basically you get what you pay for, and how often a carpet is changed depends on many factors, including its quality, how much foot traffic it's getting, how well it's maintained cleaning-wise, and how fastidious the owner is. A Steve Wynn-type casino proprietor will likely change out the carpets every couple of years, for example, with busy corridors perhaps getting changed out as often as on an annual basis or even more often, if deemed necessary. Other properties will try to milk a carpet for four or five years, while still some others (naming no names) apparently keep the same shag in situ for decades.
Obviously, it's a major headache for the casino to have to move all the equipment and take an area of the casino floor out of commission, so carpets tend to be changed by section and in the dead of night on the slowest days to cause the minimum of disruption. Some, especially at the higher-end properties, will still be hand-tufted quality, which allows for more complex designs and is fashioned from silk and/or wool. These cost in the region of $25-$35 per square foot. CYP (computerized yarn placement) carpet is widely used and comes in at about one-third of the cost of hand-tufted carpet, plus is significantly more durable. It's also cheaper than woven Axminster carpet, which is now scarcely produced domestically and mainly imported from Ireland, China, Egypt, and South Africa.
As to what happens to the old carpet, it depends. When the Boardwalk closed to make way for CityCenter, as many of the materials from the old property as possible were reused or recycled, keeping tons of potential waste from going into local landfills. The CityCenter team explored every opportunity to reuse the debris and doors, hardware, scrap steel, other metals, and carpet were sold to resellers, while broken tiles, concrete, and asphalt were taken offsite, crushed, and used as structural filler; salvaged toilets and countertops were used in projects in Mexico.
Other times, if a property is closing or undergoing a remodel, the fixtures and fittings, including carpets, may be auctioned off, as happened most recently with the Tropicana, and previously with the Sahara, Sands, Aladdin, New Frontier, Nevada Landing, and Stardust, to name a few. These events, which we always report on in Today's News, would be your best bet for snagging some shag. The rest of the time, old floor coverings tend to end up in a landfill somewhere.
