Is there any way of understanding how the casino bar accounts for drinks service? Let's say I’m in the poker room and order a beer. Does the waitress tell the bar that she's now serving the poker room and they effectively recharge the poker room for that drink? If the answer to that is yes, then how much? (The drink's cost, a fixed charge per drink, or even the opportunity cost of not being able to sell that beer for $10?) In a normal multi-department business, costs would be tallied against a business unit (or cost center) to ensure that a department can easily be judged for P&L purposes, but does this granularity actually occur at any casino?
For a Las Vegas perspective, here is MGM Resorts International spokesman Jeff Mochal. “At our properties, every comped drink served in the poker room, at slot machines, and at a table game all come from a service bar and is rung up as a comped drink at a fixed charge per drink that is charged to the location (i.e., the poker room). Comped food and beverage charges appear on our P&L statements as contra revenue and our teams in finance monitor them closely.”
We also took your query to Brett Magnan, managing director of CherryTree Hospitality Management and an associate at Raving Consulting. He answers as follows.
“First, each casino has a different practice (I hate the word ‘policy’) to account for drinks between outlets. Some charge the drinks at cost to the department consuming the drinks, while others charge the posted retail price of the drink, but offer a discount line in expenses to account for the internal cost of the drink.
“This is done to give accurate statistics to the beverage department. This practice is the same for hotel rooms or any other internal charge where the supplying department is being evaluated on their performance.
“In your example, the best practice should be to have servers allocated to the poker room and drinks rung up through a point-of-sale system that allocates both the revenue and costs to the receiving department.”
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145tech
Feb-06-2025
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