For perhaps the first time in his career, Steve Wynn is being called “cheesy.” It’s in connection with his new Philadelphia casino project, the erstwhile Foxwoods. (If, has been mooted, it’s just called “S.W.“, that would be pretentious but not cheesy, IMO.)
However, the editorial that makes this accusation is written from a virulently anti-casino skew and some of its arguments are downright moronic. You get an idea where the writer is coming from in the first paragraph, with the declaration that “casino gambling in Philadelphia will be a down-market industry, preying mostly on the poor and elderly who can least afford it.” The author tut-tuts that a “Wynnwoods” (as an S&G reader termed it) will be “acres of slot machines and scores of table games aimed at the locals living paycheck to paycheck or on fixed incomes.” Yes, as opposed to all those fine U.S. casinos that sport just a few slots and no table games. We call them “grind joints.”
The idiocy comes into play with the writer’s scandalized declaration that Wynn’s casino won’t be a $1.6 billion megaresort like Bellagio. No, it won’t be — and neither is any other casino in Pennsylvania. Why? It’s not profitable. The $800+ million Rivers Casino is sucking wind and $724 million Sands Bethlehem is faring little better.
While the Foxwoods plan called for a hotel tower (one that looked like a condominium complex built at a marina), Wynnwoods won’t be going there. Now, if the hotel was part of the Foxwoods consortium’s binding agreement the state — as were the hotel and shopping mall at Sands Bethlehem — Wynn shouldn’t be getting a mulligan. Now that Sheldon Adelson, Neil Bluhm, Peter Carlino, Cannery Casino Resorts, Gary Loveman, Mohegan Sun and others have done the heavy lifting, a just-for-Wynn exemption would be a(nother) scandal that the Keystone State’s Keystone Kops regulatory apparatus could ill afford.
Sticking to what S&G knows for sure, if anybody ought to be getting rogered for the Foxwoods fiasco, it’s Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter for trying to move the casino out of its present — and future — site, setting off a snipe hunt for a new location that consumed precious time, as the hourglass ran out on Foxwoods’ license. If the editorial gets one thing right, it’s in excoriating the propensity for Pennsylvania licenses to go to A) “george” Democratic Party donors, B) cronies of Gov. Ed Rendell or C) all of the above.
The Philadelphia Inquirer boasts an excellent gaming reporter in Suzette Parmley, who must be embarrassed to see this uninformed screed in her newspaper. It fairly bristles with ethnic prejudice and manages to dig up the most unflattering photograph of Wynn I’ve ever seen. Hey, Philadelphia Inquirer: bigoted much?
Thought for the day: “Whether an actual bankruptcy filing occurs or not, companies with high bankruptcy risk are more likely to suffer losses, defaults, restructuring, asset sales, downsizing, equity dilution and other events damaging to creditors.” Whew! Doesn’t sound like anybody we know.
(from Audit Integrity via @Comprupt)
Well, neighbourhood grind joints basically DO prey on the poor and elderly, and it appears that Wynn PA might be a glorified grind joint, but if that’s simply because the taxes are too high to be profitable, then why isn’t NJ swimming in excessively fancy resorts?
THIS MAY BE A FIRST FOR STEVE WYNN-A CASINO WITHOUT A HOTEL….IF I RECALL-THAT’S WHY HE DROPPED OUT OF THE NEW ORLEANS ATTEMPT YEARS AGO….OF COURSE-WHEN HE TOOK OVER THE GOLDEN NUGGET IN VEGAS-IT HAD NO ROOMS-AND WE ALL KNOW HOW HE TURNED THAT AROUND….IT IS NOT WISE TO SECOND GUESS STEVE WYNN…..
The article may be somewhat idiotic, but its basic premise isn’t. Casinos are destructive to the local economy, in that they create nothing, but siphon off wealth that winds up somewhere else altogether (and PLEEEEEEZE don’t mention the relative handfuls of minimum-wage service jobs they offer). They are destructive to the social fabric of a community, and what the columnist said about the victims/targets of gambling is true; gambling, unfortunately, is a highly regressive tax, in effect, aimed at the poor and at the stupid.
The current circling-the-drain state of Las Vegas is a case in point. An entire city that produces nothing but the opportunity for people to travel there and hand somebody a dollar bill and get back 95 cents, over and over, until they run out of money, has no legitimate industry or product to fall back on when people (amazingly!!) find they have better things to do with their time and money.
Perhaps Vegas wouldn’t be anything more than another Barstow or Baker without casino gambling. Fine: perhaps it should be allowed to shrink to that status. But it seems grotesque to take a developed area, that already has its own raison d’etre, and turn its economy into an antiproductive boom-bust simulacrum. Vegas is nothing, but at least it was CREATED out of nothing. The same cannot be said for 2010 Pennsylvania.
Mr. Lewis, it’s a pity the Philadelphia Inquirer editorial wasn’t written a fraction as well as your comment.
As for the PA taxes, I don’t think that’s the bar to profitability. The revenue base hasn’t proven large enough so far to support a $700 million-$800 million casino product. Judging by his description of the revised project, Wynn has been doing his homework vis-a-vis locals casinos. What he describes sounds a lot more like a hotel-less version of Suncoast or South Point, neither of which I’d describe as a “grind joint” — that’d be Slots-A-Fun. 🙂
My 2 cents, or maybe a quarter, is that there are good grind joints and bad ones depending on what the customer wants. I’d probably miss a grind joint like Slots-O-Fun — its a more fun use of that space than a girft shop, a fast food place or more parking at Circus Jerkus. As for the Philadelphia Inquirer editorial, it’s a tired argument but not moronic. Casinos have been mixed blessings, at best, in places like Detroit and St. Louis which are roughly comparable to Philadelphia. Casinos don’t belong everywhere, but it’s a brave new world. The question is whether there is a place in the new world for places like Reno, Atlantic City and, ultimately, even Las Vegas when casinos spread to places like Chicago’s Loop, Manhatten, Toronto and Seattle.
WynnWoods is a name that will never be used for this casino. Wynnewood is a town along Philadelphia’s ritzy Main Line, and the residents would never let a casino use the same name as their home.
Casinos in the Loop? What a terrible idea. I go to Chicago often and if there’s one downtown area that’s doing very w/o a casino (and all its attendant traffic snarls), that’d be it … as opposed to Detroit, where the casinos some of the very few bright spots downtown, especially the MGM property.
Whoops. That last sentence should read \are some of the very few …\ — except for Lafayette’s, with its wonderful Coney Island hot dogs. I also wanted to add the MGM Grand Detroit is a better all-round property than anything in CityCenter. That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.
I’m not for casinos in Chicago’s Loop either but in the long term it just seems to me that casinos are going to be virtually everywhere, including possible every home computer and I-pad. The pressure for voluntary sources of revenue is just too great for any jurisdiction to resist. Downtown Philadelphia is just another indication of the trend. Downtown Philly is not a depressed area like Detroit. When the market is completely saturated and if discretionary income remains flat I think destinations like Reno and Atlantic City could really implode and that bodes poorly for Vegas too. It will take time but saturation sure seems to be the way the wind is blowing.
I live in Chicago (near Wrigley Field) and I agree that casinos do not belong in the Chicago Loop. There is already plenty to do there and there is no need for a casino. Harrahs Horseshoe is in Hammond, Indiana and that is about 20 miles away or so from the Chicago Loop and that is where most of the people who live in the city of Chicago go to gamble.