Warm February in Philly; “Lion King” hungry

After a pretty lackluster January, gaming revenues in Pennsylvania bounced back at the slots.  The statewide February average was a 10% increase year/year, with Sands Bethlehem right on that button ($22 million) and Harrah’s Chester Downs down 2% ($24 million). Millennium Gaming‘s outlying The Meadows racino came on like a tornado, improving 31% to finish the month with $21 million. Same for The Rivers, whose slots raked in 32% more, putting $23 million in the hopper. There’s strength in that market, which is still in the running for at least one more casino license. Despite a 2% dip (cannibalization by SugarHouse?), Parx Casino remains the top dog statewide, with $31 million.

Unless SugarHouse has already reported its table revenue, I suspect there’s a typo in the J.P. Morgan analyst report — which has SugarHouse pulling down $13 million at the slots — since it shows the casino grossing the same amount ($14.5 million) in February as January, even though it’s a shorter month. It’s not an impossible feat: Presque Isle racino and The Meadows did it just with slot play. But it wouldn’t be like Pennsylvania to bust out one casino’s table revenues ahead of everyone else’s.

Hungry Lion. Who says The Lion King isn’t hurting at the Mandalay Bay box office? A press release from MGM Resorts International touts a $75 buffet/show deal for weekend matinées of the Elton John tuner. (Call the box office reservation line and utter the magic word “buffet.”) Can you feel the love? Not in the afternoons, apparently.

Steve Friess is having great fun with what he’s dubbed “the Vdara Kwik-E Mart.” It’s a good idea, long overdue for that lonely and rather arid hotel, the backwater of CityCenter. The office moniker is Market Cafe Vdara, so at least they didn’t get cutesy with it, although I have a feeling the “Kwik-E Mart” nickname will stick. As described by MGM, it’s rather like a Starbucks with a dairy aisle. The inventory is one or two steps up — and package sizes down — from what you’d find at Vons.

When a glass of Vdara orange juice costs less than a gallon of gas, I have to wonder if there are really enough people in this world for whom money is no object; an existential question that has dogged CityCenter from its inception. But it’s early yet and, if I’m right, market forces will exert corrective pressure. They might also “correct” the operating hours, more apt for a sleepy Midwestern town than Sin City. When you need that $8 bottle of aspirin with, oh, maybe 12 tablets at around 9:03 p.m. — as once happened to me at Trump International — and Market Cafe Vdara is V-closed, it’ll seem like more of “inconvenience store.”