If you hadn’t figured it out by my last post, I’m on vacation in Las Vegas. Everytime I visit Las Vegas, I’m struck by how much the Vegas of today is not the Vegas of old. I have fond memories of visiting Las Vegas with my parents in the 1970s (I might have gone in the 1960s, but I don’t remember that), and staying in hotels like the Sahara and the Aladdin. That Vegas is long gone, baby.
Here’s example number one. I’m not a big gambler; hell, I’m not a gambler. Still, when I visit Las Vegas, I normally go through my coin jar and bring a bag of quarters to play with. Today, we went down to the MGM Grand and I thought I might play a little. Guess what? Not a single machine takes coins. They all take bills. Loads of penny slots…. with a $1 minimum. Hell, there are $100 slots. But no coin slots. Why? This saves the casinos money. No change girls required. No maintenance of machines and coin counting. No coin cups. I’m surprised that they haven’t yet designed machines that just take the credit cards, but perhaps they aren’t there solely because of the compulsive gamblers. Of course, the plus side of this is that my bag of quarters remains unspent.
Example number two. My, how the casinos have changed. In the old days, everything serviced the casino. The hotel floor ran through through the casino. There were perhaps one or two restaurants: a coffee shop and a fancy steakhouse (I certainly remember that at the Sahara). There was a simple pool with lounges. There were a few resort shops. Today? There are loads and loads of fancier and fancier restaurants. There are loads and loads of shops. There are nightclubs and dayclubs galore. You can even avoid the casino if you want. Every component of the hotel is its own profit center, and stands on its own. I, for one, don’t like it.
Example number three. In the old days, showrooms had headliners. Current stars of the day would play the showrooms, and you would have dinner and a show. Tickets were affordably priced, and you could get great seats for a little tipping. Today? There are sit-down (as in production) shows everyone (half of them Cirque). No plot — just tired-businessman-and-women shows (read “good looking gals and gents”) doing various forms of jukebox variety shows and dance. Your “headliners” are either on their way up or on their way down, not people at the top of their game. Comics aren’t headlining, they are in the comedy clubs. Show prices are through the roof, but most people get discounts. They do this either through half-price outlets on the strip, or the way we did it. How did we do it? Read on, McDuff.
Example number four. Timeshares. Vegas used to be a hotel town. Now it is timeshares everywhere. Of course, the timeshare market has tanked as the housing bubble crashed, so the timeshare pitch is different. How do we know. Simple: We got $17.50/person tickets to Zumanity (which are normally $55/person tickets) by sitting through a timeshare pitch for foreclosed timeshares. In some ways, it reminded me of the old days in college where we would bait the Moonies or the J4Js. This pitch was attempting to get you to purchase a timeshare by paying off the balance of the loan that a bank had acquired through foreclosure. Didn’t make a difference where the timeshare was, for you would exchange it using RCI Points. They kept trying to say that this would get you a vacation for the exchange fee, when the truth was that the vacation would cost you the exchange fee plus your annual HOA fees plus the annual RCI membership fee plus the amortized cost of the balance of the timeshare. As engineers we both saw this, but I’m sure most of the suckers don’t. We had no strong desire to acquire another timeshare — I already have two weeks at year at The Whaler in Kaanapali HI, and am using Interval International to exchange those weeks when we can’t make it. In any case, the timeshare folks are everywhere! We were walking from MGM Grand down towards Ballys, and we were acosted by numerous timeshare folks offering us discounted tickets if we would only listen to their pitches. Sorry, but one a day is enough. [ETA: While looking into the history of the place we are staying, I found some interesting numbers: According to David Saxe, who operates the V Theatres in the Miracle Mile shops, when someone takes a tour or sits through a timeshare sales pitch, they receive a voucher which they then bring to the box office. The theatre operator then adds up the voucher and bills the timeshare operator (so, in our case, the timeshare operator paid $55 less $17.50 for our ticket). Saxe estimates time shares account for 20 percent of total show tickets bought in Las Vegas; for some small shows, it can be up to 50% of the business — without a cash outlay for advertising.]
Tomorrow, I’m hoping to try to discover the old Vegas. I’m hoping to see the Mob Museum and the Neon Graveyard, and perhaps the original rooms that are left at the heart of the Riviera.
