Harrah’s total email fun

I signed up for a Total Rewards card a while ago to get on the mailing list. Theoretically, I should be collecting promotional materials from all casinos down at the Center for Gaming Research. But because most casino people I talk to consider preserving their history only marginally less important than alphabetizing their recyclables, I’m not. I keep getting mailers for Boulder Station at home, because of where I live, and I bring them in, so 50 years from now historians will know exactly what they were doing to lure people to Boulder Station, but will only be able to speculate about the promotions offered on the Strip.

So I’ve been getting emails from every Harrah’s property in the world for a while now. It’s funny, because I haven’t gambled a penny with that card, and I figured that would throw the data miners for a loop. But they keep on trying to get me to come down, with offer after offer.

Earlier this week, I got an offer from Paris that dreamily begged me to come down to the hotel and bask in the waves of romance that wash over the property. A while ago, you might recall, I wrote a post here about the bifurcation of Paris’s marketing into distinct gay and straight campaigns. I later elaborated this into an LVBP piece, as well.

So imagine my surprise when I got an email from Paris whose subject line asked me to “fuel my passion” at Paris Las Vegas. I scanned the email for any reference to golf. There was none, although there was this sentence:

It’s a feast for all your senses, with decadent spa treatments and the signature tastes and tempting aromas of France.

Hmmm. Very “romantic,” huh? Now there’s an interesting twist. That day at the gym, I just happened to be doing incline presses as “I Want Candy” by Bow Wow Wow played. As I was in the middle of my set, I looked around the gym and thought, “Jeez, this is probably the most ‘romantic’ (which I guess is the Paris codeword) thing I’ve done in a long, long time,” while all the other guys working out tried to pretend it was Metallica’s “Fuel” or stopped lifting weights until something more butch came on.

So when I got the email from Paris I thought, “Wow, these guys are good.”

But I think they’re going too far. This morning I got another email, this one from Harrah’s Resort Atlantic City. They think that I’m putting on weight, or something, and they want to give me one ticket free if I can find an out-of-shape friend to accompany me to an afternoon with the guy who wrote The Best Life Diet. Actually, I’m into some serious distance running training for the LV marathon now, which means that I’m 10 pounds lighter than I was 2 months ago, so no dice there.

Even if I needed to trim down a little bit, I don’t think it’s a casinos’ place to suggest it to me. And just on general principles: I’ve said this before, but a casino is just about the last place I’d go for advice on how to eat right. I mean, these are the people who encourage you to gorge yourself until you can’t move and have to plant yourself at a nickel slot machine until you’ve digested enough to walk in a straight line.

That last bit tangentially touches on an idea I’m working on–I’m trying to connect Thomas Sowell’s argument about constrained vs. unconstrained visions of humanity to the casino business. It might actually make some sense when I’m done with it.

My job would be much easier if I could settle on an approach: ‘irreverent, anarchic humor” or “serious, intellectual contemplation.” Ah, who says you’ve got to choose? After all, it is gaming I’m talking about, and the very name reveals that it’s all just a game.

I’m going to get out of here before I push that last line of thought too far and get swamped with angry comments about the ludic fallacy.