Question of the Day - 23 June 2017

After playing slots for a while, I cashed several tickets that had coins in the payout. Went to the cashier to exchange the coins into dollars and the cashier wouldn’t accept a Canadian coin that I had just received from the redemption machine. What’s up with that? 

Well, we'd say that's due to one difference between machines and humans (we'll leave the others to engineers, philosophers, and science-fiction writers). Probably what happened was a Canadian coin snuck into the machine during a big fill, from rolls or bags of coins direct from the bank. Meanwhile, the casino you were playing in doesn’t take foreign money, not even a coin that it just, inadvertently, dispensed. Most don’t. Casinos aren’t in the currency-exchange business -- unless they advertise that fact, like some in Reno that cater to Canadians and do exchange Canadian coins for chips and U.S money. But for the rest, it’s too much of a hassle.

With all the major casinos getting rid of the free valet service, have the car-rental agencies in Las Vegas seen a decline in rentals? And is there any movement to return to the free valets? I know myself personally have not been back due to all the nickel and diming that has happened over the past decade.

We get this question all the time. We’ve tried on a number of occasions to track down data about it, but the rental-car companies neither break down their sales by region nor talk to the media about it. We do know, anecdotally, that the big rental-car companies’ stocks have been hammered in the past several years, but that’s more due to Uber/Lyft, sluggish demand from commercial customers, and rising costs than paid parking hereabouts.

In Las Vegas, we get mixed signals. On the one hand, lines for the shuttle buses from the airport to the car-rental center have been very long all year. On the other, valets at some Strip properties have been laid off. In the end, it’s anyone’s guess.

But we'd bet on one thing: Charging to valet park on the Strip will remain in place at least until the next economic meltdown -- which is, we predict, coming.

I understand that cashing a check at a casino can be problematic, especially if I’m a different casino than the one I am staying at. With that in mind, can I go to the cage and use my debit card to get an advance, rather than going to an ATM?

Yes, you can use a debit card for an advance from the cage. But you won’t save any money over an ATM. In fact, it’ll most likely cost you more -- around the 4% range (a nearly impossible edge to overcome going into a casino gambling game). However, it might be your only choice if it’s the middle of the night and no banks are open or you need more cash than the daily ATM limit of $300-$400.

Since your new website was introduced, I'm unable to find Bob Dancer's column. Is it still being published or has it been discontinued? Sure hope it's still around.

Good question. And yes, it's still being posted, but it's now on our gambling website, GamblingWithAnEdge.com. You can get there via LasVegasAdvisor.com, through the drop-down menu under Casinos/Gambling in the top navigation menu; then click on Bloggers. You can also go direct via this link, which you can then bookmark.

Can you share with us some of the “I can’t believe they asked that” questions received over the years?

Actually, there’ve been such QoDs in the past; the most recent was the April Fool’s Day answer in 2014. But that was during the previous QoD regime. The current editor doesn’t relish spotlighting ignorance, which is, after all, simple unknowledge. You can’t know everything, even things that most other people know. That’s a major reason, in our humble opinion, why Question of the Day is such a popular feature.

Also, the truth is, we don’t get many questions of that sort. Our readers are smart, savvy, and well-informed, as everyone can readily see from the high level of the questions. The submission that makes us frown from time to time is the one we’ve answered recently and even that’s easily forgivable — the submitter simply didn’t see it. Now that the archives are open, we can and do email the submitters direct links to the answers.

In your answer on May 16 on tipping, you used the word “zooks.” Do we really need another synonym for “tips?”

You’re absolutely right. We don’t. We already have two: tokes and zooks.