Nurse the Hate: Hate Las Vegas

 

I have been remiss in writing for a couple of reasons.  1) I have not had the energy needed to do so, and 2) I haven’t felt particularly inspired.  I was in Vegas this weekend.  That city, if nothing else, forces you to confront humanity.  Las Vegas when I first started to visit in the early 1990s was built on the idea of providing excellent food, cheap drinks and an inexpensive trip to softly coerce you onto the casino floor to get your ass kicked.  It was very possible to win money on The Strip with double deck blackjack that paid 2-1 on blackjacks, single zero roulette wheels, and traditional odds on craps.  Most people wound up losing because they didn’t know when to walk away or they just couldn’t play the game very well.  If you lost, it was on you.

Now Las Vegas is set up to pound it up your ass with a stick.  Blackjack pays 6-5 with dealers hitting soft 17s on continuous shuffle six decks.  Roulette wheels have three (3) zeros.  Beers are $12.  Food prices are jacked up so far that the Airport seemed like a cheap place to grab lunch on the way out.  Example… I had a $38 breakfast of two scrambled eggs, chicken sausage and a piece of toast.  I had a $28 bowl of Ramen.  Even the pricing of the hotel is a scam with a $180 advertised room fee that doesn’t include a $45 daily “resort fee”.  Clearly the Corporate Overlords of MGM Properties said, “Fuck it.  Just keep jacking everything up for more profits until The Rubes push back.”.  As far as I can see, The Rubes are going to keep eating price increases.  They just don’t care.

I didn’t play a single table game and just quietly took $900 out of the joint betting baseball.  Meanwhile I sat and watched guys in Cracker Barrel Gift Shop t-shirts continuously losing their asses on all the tables.  Who are these people and how do they not know they’re getting scalped?  How can they afford it?  There was a full house at a “Day Club” at the resort which is a pool with horrible club music which costs $25 to walk into, another $250 for a lounge chair and then a $500 minimum spend.  You can get six bottles of water for $78 in case you get thirsty in the 95 degree desert heat.  If you’ve got $250 you can buy a $15 bottle of Kim Crawford sauvignon blanc.  How about a $500 bottle of $38 Moet Chandon?  I mean, I’m pretty comfortable financially and I’m thinking “who the fuck are those people paying that and why?”.

The other thing that kills me is this new tipping culture our American Corporate Overlords and their record profits have hit us with…  Why am I now expected to tip 20% on anything I buy?  Why do I have to pay for your work force regardless of what that service is?  I got hit for a tip at Starbucks, a shop where I bought a baseball cap, and the little sundry shop in the lobby.  I gotta shell out another 20% for some jacked up $5.00 Altoids because you need to employ someone to work a register?  “Hey man, if you start tipping another buck, we can reduce the hourly pay in here and increase our profit margins.”  Fuck that.

The amazing thing is that Vegas is KILLING IT.   The Las Vegas Strip grossed $8.83 Billion last year, up 7.2% over 2022.  They had a 10.6% increase in table game revenue and 4.8% increase in slot machine revenue.  Occupancy rates at the hotels are 97.9%.  It’s incredible really.  Whatever it is that people are really buying, the experience, the illusion, or the myth, it’s working.  It might not be my cup of tea any longer, but for all the chumps on my Frontier flight, they can’t get enough. 

The plane ride on the only direct flight out of Cleveland is loud and rowdy.  The flight home is quiet as they lick their wounds.  I got made fun of by the flight attendants on Frontier because I was carrying a book.  “Ohhh!  Look at what we got here!  A reader! HaHa!”  People in pajama pants trudge down the corridor of Terminal A to go face their jobs tomorrow morning.  Gotta go to work.  Gotta save up for the next trip out there.  Meanwhile Vegas churns on 24/7/365 looking for new margins to exploit.  I will tell you this.  As long as the lemmings come, I’m not playing any blackjack and I’m not staying on The Strip.