Just to show you the kind of week I’m having, it’s Thursday and I’m just now getting around to posting a link to my bi-weekly LVBP column, which I should have done on Monday or Tuesday. I just got the beta version of the Macau gaming summary up, and I’ve jumped into a study of Nevada casino employment that’s getting more and more interesting. I’m tracking trends in payroll and productivity from 1990 to 2009, and everything I find opens up new questions.
Which is actually similar to what happened with an Atlantic City slot study that I did a few weeks ago. With the dramatic decline in the number of slots, win per slot has actually remained fairly robust. Here’s my column explaining it in the LVBP:
Atlantic City has had a rough few years. A partial smoking ban has hurt business and the debut of several competitors, particularly Pennsylvania slot machines, has reduced the city’s already-modest horizons. With the recent introduction of table games, it’;s a good time to look at how Atlantic City’s core business, slot machines, has fared over the years.
via Las Vegas Business Press :: David G. Schwartz : Slots keep Atlantic City’s hopes for future afloat.
Looking at this data got me thinking that the future might be a smaller industry, which is bad news for Atlantic City, but not such bad news for operators who can run a good casino.
There’s some goofy stuff going on with the formatting (a paragraph is repeated at the end), but hopefully that doesn’t detract too much from the column’s main point.
I’ve never known much about Atlantic City until I started coming to this blog. I’m from California and my image of AC was about 40 years out of date.
In the last two weeks I’ve been doing research on the vacation options and attractions available there. Suddenly, it’s become one of the places I want to visit the most (mainly due to it having seaside attractions combined with the comparable food and hotel services available in Las Vegas).
This report helped me to better understand Atlantic City’s gaming industry and its chances of surviving (or not) in the USA Gambling Market.
But if I look at AC purely as a “vacation resort” I think it has great potential for recovery in that market.
It’s one of America’s Great Places. Somehow they need to advertise the town’s attractions much better than they are currently doing.
I don’t understand why they don’t advertise the town and area better to people on the West Coast. People on the West Coast barely even know AC exists or know anything about all the exciting things available there.
I really believe they could rise out of their slump simply by publicizing and advertising their vacation attractions to all the Non-Easterners who know very little about the place.
I can’t understand why they don’t concentrate on luring people there from the West Coast…and basically all points west of the Mississippi.
It isn’t the price of plane-fare that keeps Non-Easterners way from AC. The extra cost of traveling there can’t be too much higher…considering how low plane fares are now-a-days.
Non-Easterners just don’t know much about Atlantic City. And that’s not their fault. Atlantic City’s advertising and publicity-machinery are way, way too out of date. They really need to re-market themselves better. If they would they will probably surprise themselves. Who wouldn’t want to go to Atlantic City at least once in their lives?
I plan to go there as soon as I can….and I never thought I’d ever think or say that.
Small important edit on your linked Macau study. Its 8MOP=$1, not the other way around.
Thanks–very important. The math still works out correctly, but that’s a big one. Should have caught it. I’ll change that right now.
Fixed.
Slots?
I’ve no great certainty as to what the best metric is.
Win per machine, win per player, win per day?
In Vegas, slots are for tourists, for ambiance, for locals, for retirees, … etc. A casino’s success at drawing in busloads of retirees might actually best be measured not by the money drawn into the counting room’s maw but by the percentage of market share that casino has in regard to pensioners living in the area.
The entire slot market would then be measured as an amalgam of the various slot market segments: tourists, retirees, commuters, etc.
Then we could measure Atlantic City by comparing it to comparables for Las Vegas. If a gambler flies five hours to Vegas and drops ten grand in four days then Atlantic City is doing better if a gambler travels only two hours and drops five grand in one day.
Its sort of the way a restaurant looks at the per check amount but also looks at how many times a day they turn over their tables.
Atlantic City has a close by market despite Pennsylvania now having a “closer” market, Atlantic City should be doing very much better than it now is.