Hard Rock ups Atlantic City commitment; Japan inspires casino designers

Compared to Carl Icahn‘s half-a-loaf policies, Hard Rock International CEO Jim Allen is Lady Bountiful, at least as concerns [Trump] Taj Mahal. We put The Donald’s name in brackets because it’s one of the first things to go, to be followed by all traces of his stylistic influence. “The amount of money we’re going to have to spend to remove all those minarets and all that purple. Jesus! What were we thinking,” Allen queried rhetorically. He means business, too: He’s just upped his already-generous $350 million reinvestment to a cool half-billion dollars. Glenn Straub talks a good game over at Revel but Allen is putting his money where his mouth is. For instance, he’s promised a pact with Unite-Here and the latter must have liked what it heard, as President Robert McDevitt is never shy about expressing displeasure. (Allen can hardly plead Icahn-style poverty when $500 million is going into the Taj.)

“It does us no good to put some guitars on the wall and new carpets, and say, ‘I can take 5 or 10 percent of the business from Resorts or Harrah’s.” Actually, 10% of Resorts Atlantic City is still chump change. Ten percent of Harrah’s Resort would be a good start, though. And the Hard Rock brand brings something strikingly new to the Atlantic City market. (Revisionist historians can have a field day speculating what would have happened had Trump not walked out of a rebranding of Trump’s Castle as a Hard Rock literally the night before it was to have been announced.) Normally we’d have trepidation about such a big investment but we think Allen is onto something.

* If you’re an ex-con in Massachusetts, you’ve got one strike against you. And if you want to work at MGM Springfield, you’ve got two strikes against you, maybe three, due to state regulations that forbid hiring reformed criminals. But the casino is charged with creating economic opportunity for the downtrodden, which is why it and Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno are petitioning the Massachusetts Gaming Commission to loosen the rules so that ex-cons can work in non-gaming positions.

Casino President Michael Mathis (below) advocated “holding the owners, key executives and individuals involved in the gaming operation to a different standard than the warehouse manager, kitchen porter and bowling alley clerk,” while Sarno called for a fair and commonsense approach in ensuring that offenders of minor crimes can turn their lives around and develop a renewed sense of self-esteem through gainful, meaningful employment.” And unemployment in Springfield is well above state average. That’s one of the reasons the MGC, in its infinite wisdom, put a megaresort there. The Springfield City Council backed up Sarno’s position but the MGC was noncommittal, taking the issue under advisement.

* The first proposal for a Japanese megaresort is in and it’s the handiwork not of Steve Wynn or Sheldon Adelson but of UNLV International Gaming Institute student Rebecca Ross, who pitched a 50-story hotel accessorized with Top Golf and a sumo-wrestling arena that seats 4,500. Professor Bo Bernhard said celebrity judges from the major casino companies said his students had come to the same conclusions that they had. Another project that got top marks — except perhaps from those with a fear of heights — was Nguyen Tran‘s proposal for a 180-story hotel with glass-floored elevators. Not for me, thanks. But impressive nonetheless.

Lawrence H0, meanwhile, has his heart set on Osaka. He’s not ruled out Tokyo but feels Osaka is more entertainment-starved and is closer to Kyoto. “When you go to the Kansai region, it’s more fun, really, and we’re a company that focuses on fun and entertainment,” he said of the Osaka area, adding, “Tokyo by itself is amazing. It’s like when
people ask me: ‘Do you think New York and London need an integrated resort?’ No, they don’t.”. (It’s also much costlier to build in Tokyo.) If the government wants casinos in secondary cities, to spread the wealth, the big players will find they have locked themselves out. As MGM Resorts International‘s Ed Bowers said, “MGM’s business model is to build large-scale destination resorts with lots of stuff that cost a lot of money. So it needs to be in a high-density population area.” Ho also knows he’s in a costly contest and finds himself almost literally falling over his rivals: “Sometimes, I go into a Japanese corporate’s office, and then I walk out and I see our competitors in the lobby.” Good for Japan, maybe not so good for Melco Entertainment.

* Talk about the Nanny State! Gambling is so prevalent in Great Britain that governmental intervention is the topic of the moment. The fulcrum of controversy are fixed-odds betting terminals, of which Britons can’t get enough. Since 2009, the number of machines has only risen by 9% but player losses have grown an astounding 73%. For some, the cries out for governmental intervention and it’s become a campaign issue. “Losses on FOBTs are spiralling out of control. Every year more and more is lost on these addictive machines, so the next government must act to reduce the maximum stake to £2 a spin,” said Member of Parliament Carolyn Harris. Both Labour and the Liberal Democratic parties favor the £2-a-flutter cap. The incumbent Department for Culture, Media & Sport is promising bet limits of £10 or £20 … if it’s rewarded with electoral victory, of course. For the moment it’s not rocking the boat. Still, British punters seem set to have their knuckles rapped by Big Government, to one extent or another.

* Mad props to S&G reader Stephen R. Brown for performing a quest for the provenance of the Sahara trademark: “A search on the US Patent and Trademark Office‘s TESS database shows four active Sahara trademarks that are owned by Stockbridge/SBE Holdings, LLC. Presumably when Stockbridge bought out SBE’s stake in the venture, they became the owner of said trademarks. So if that’s the case, then the name belongs to the new owners.” Confirms Vital Vegas author Scott Roeben, “Stockbridge owns the [Sahara] name, included in the sale from what I understand.” It sounds as though we can be reasonably confident that the Sahara moniker will be back where it always belonged, Harry Reid to the contrary. (Now there’s a place that could use some minarets. Sigh!)