Question of the Day - 26 August 2021

In yesterday's installment about the history of comps, we covered the era from the inception of casino freebies as far back as the late 1930s and early '40s all the way up to the pit boss as the issuer of comps -- relationship marketing, handshake protocols, direct and personal, and little if any accounting. 

But then, the corporate bean counters left the bosses' pencil, but took away the power, and turned them, in essence, into clerks, paper shufflers; the emphasis of the floorman's job description switched from casino marketing to casino accounting. 

The old informal comp system took off into two divided directions. The first focused on table-game players. The best casino bosses were kicked upstairs and even though they were absorbed by the marketing department, they were really an extension of the casino. They became player-development representatives, otherwise known as "hosts." They continued to cater to their A-lists of dice shooters and card players, known as their "book." And the table-game comp system evolved into what, essentially, it remains today: hosts trading all the casino temptations at their disposal in exchange for max bets times hours played times theoretical loss, known as "theo." If you want to follow that particular bouncing ball, read our book Whale Hunt in the Desert -- Secrets of a Vegas Superhost. It tells the whole story. 

The other direction involved the ascendance of slot players. It wasn't until the early 1980s that slot players got any respect from the casino when, in 1982, the world's first slot club debuted at the Atlantic City Sands. The earliest members of the Galaxy Slot Club were invited to special events and parties and wore gold lapel pins to signify them as casino VIPs.

A couple of years later, Harrah's Atlantic City took a big step forward in the burgeoning slot-club direction by devising a new system in which slot players received a bonus ticket for every $100 they put through a machine. The tickets were issued by special dispensers attached to the machines, similar to skee ball tickets in kids arcades, which could be redeemed for various amenities in the hotel -- rooms, food, gift-shop items, and the like. The Golden Nugget was the first casino in Las Vegas to institute a slot club, with a similar ticket-issuing system, in the mid-1980s. 

From there, slot clubs grew much more sophisticated, with plastic ID cards, electronic player-tracking systems, tier levels, multiple-point promotions, point-of-purchase redemption, and endless variations on the theme of "the more you play, the more goodies you get." Table-game players were gradually incorporated into the electronic tracking systems, reflected by the update of the name to "players clubs."

What the Queen of Comps calls the “golden years” of casino freebies involved comps, for sure, but also cashback and monthly mailers full of dining and hotel offers and free-play coupons. Soon, the casinos found themselves competing in what Jean Scott dubbed “free-play wars,” progressively upping the amounts to get a bigger share of the customer market. "It was, indeed, a glorious time for the casino gambler," she wrote in a recent blog post. 

Alas, to a certain extent, the golden age of comps has passed into the mists of history. Cutbacks in comps predated the pandemic by several years. For example, free parking was the most common comp, even if you had to get a parking-garage ticket validated in the casino (downtown). Paid parking on the Strip smashed that bandwagon into the wall. But COVID has hammered a number of new nails into the comp coffin. Case in point: The buffet was always one of the easiest comps to earn, but the superbuffets upped that ante and since the shutdowns, most buffets haven't even reopened. Another example: When Anthony Curtis tried to negotiate with Station Casinos for coupons in this year's LVA Member Rewards Book, he was told, and we quote, "We're not giving anything away." 

So that's where the comp situation now stands. You can still get them, of course, but the gravy train has long since left the station. 

As for the future of comps, tune in tomorrow for Part 3.