Question of the Day - 17 November 2024

We’d love to see those statistic too. But except in the rawest possible form, they don't exist, at least as far as we know. 

The Nevada Department of Employment, Training & Rehabilitation (DETR) provides some breakdown, of which more below. The Nevada Gaming Control Board relies on DETR’s information. As for academics, they’re largely at the mercy of such detail as the Silver State deigns to vouchsafe the public.

DETR tracks overall casino employment, broken into six subcategories. But that’s as granular as it gets. For instance, overall casino employment was 162,066 before the pandemic in 2020. By 2023, despite a strong economic recovery in Nevada, gaming employment had withered to 142,849. (We're indebted to the Control Board’s Michael Lawton for these figures.)

Every department except “Other” (which went up) took it in the shorts, with casino employees going from a pre-COVID 38,080 to a post-recovery 33,020. Where those 5,060 jobs were eliminated, no one can say with authority. It’s highly doubtful that they all were displaced table-game dealers, however.

We consulted a variety of experts and ran into the same blank wall every time. For instance, Lawton says, “Speculation is that technological advances have played a part in this trend, in addition to operational efficiencies implemented once gaming operations resumed and ramped up after the 78-day closure in 2020.” Unfortunately, “technological advances” cuts a very wide swath, eliminating everything from bartenders (by robots) to your favorite blackjack dealer.

The same is true for the switch from coin-paying slots to ticket-in/ticket-out (TITO). “It’s a little complicated,” writes Dr. Anthony Lucas of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. “For example, change-person (coin-sales) jobs were lost with TITO, but slot ambassador jobs were created. Hard-count positions were lost, but only if no coin games remained on the floor. The net effect is difficult to estimate.”

UNLV gambling experts Brett Abarbanel and David G. Schwartz were likewise stumped.

One also has to take into account the larger movements of the U.S. economy. Casinos were riding high at the time of Sept. 11, 2001, after which thousands of job positions were eliminated. This beclouds the impact of TITO, which was first field-tested at the now-vanished Fiesta Casino in North Las Vegas in September 2000. 

A booming Sin City recovery from the War on Terror was quashed in the autumn of 2008 by the stock-market crash and housing-market collapse, stunting Las Vegas economically for the better part of a decade to come. Again, job losses to economic adversity masked the effects of technological displacement.

So it was again in 2021. In the process of weathering the pandemic, the gaming industry found that it could run casinos with a) fewer employees and b) bigger profits. It’s the sort of epiphany that doubtless accelerated the adoption of electronic table games.

Until or unless the gambling public makes clear a preference for the human touch in a casino environment, this trend is not going to change. As for the possibility of seeing hard data on the mechanization of the gambling floor— and its employee impact, we’re not optimistic.