{"id":3966,"date":"2010-07-07T10:28:20","date_gmt":"2010-07-07T18:28:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/?p=3966"},"modified":"2010-07-07T15:30:56","modified_gmt":"2010-07-07T23:30:56","slug":"vegas-continues-to-confound","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/vegas-continues-to-confound\/","title":{"rendered":"Vegas continues to confound"},"content":{"rendered":"

A friend recently posed to me the question of how Nevada<\/strong>‘s casino revenues can be so anemic at a time when casino floors appear so crowded<\/a> (only 100K fewer visitors in April 2009<\/a> than two years earlier). I’m coming around to the school of thought that consumers have fundamentally changed their spending habits<\/a> but that casinos haven’t wised up to this.<\/p>\n

\"\"Even with — thanks to a quirk of Silver State law — slot revenues from the end of April rolled into May’s results, the latter weren’t anything about which to crow. For the state as a whole, only three months in 2009 posted lower grosses than this May’s $847 million. The Strip’s $450 million (-6%) was middling by last year’s standards but the locals market remains anemic, despite harbingers of recovery in Downtown<\/strong> (flat), on the Boulder Strip<\/strong> (6%) and in North Las Vegas<\/strong> (8%). Outlying markets such as Laughlin<\/strong> (-5%) and Reno<\/strong> (-7%) continue to struggle, while Lake Tahoe<\/strong> — which has the second-lowest gross of any Nevada submarket — is so diminished you wonder why they even bother up there.<\/p>\n

(Strange but true<\/em>: The owners of the Siena Casino Hotel Spa<\/strong>, who can scarcely make payroll at their own joint<\/a>, want to reopen the recently shuttered Club Cal Neva<\/strong>. I’m not sure which is the more delusional notion: adding more casino inventory to Lake Tahoe or entrusting the task to a company that’s barely solvent.)<\/p>\n

Tightening the slots, as well as the belated reportage of late-April revenues, meant a rare 4% bump in Strip win for the one-armed bandits. Luck wasn’t with the casinos at their tables. There, once baccarat win was factored out, revenues fell 2%. Sports books got hammered, too<\/a>. While I expect May 2010’s visitation numbers to be an improvement on last year’s, that will only widen the disconnect between what we see and what the cash register tells us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A friend recently posed to me the question of how Nevada‘s casino revenues can be so anemic at a time when casino floors appear so crowded (only 100K fewer visitors in April 2009 than two years earlier). I’m coming around … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[88,28,51,14,76,49,78,25,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3966"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3966"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3966\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3974,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3966\/revisions\/3974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/stiffs-and-georges\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}