Atlantic City to make another push for customers

Originally Posted by 21forme

Norm, that's life in Manhattan. Enough Manhattanites figured out how to make it out to the Hamptons every weekend, right?

My ex-business partner had a house in the Hamptons. Every weekend had to make the trek. Sometimes took the jitney and sometimes a plane to the tiny airstrip. He did not enjoy it. But, his wife stayed out there all summer. I hate the trip. There's a reason they call it "Long" Island. It's 90 miles long with miserable traffic at the far end. Gave a presentation once in Montauk, way out at the end, to one of the top guys in banking. He skipped all that, took a helicopter and landed on the lawn.

Originally Posted by shadroch

If you think AC is bad now, you should have seen it in the late 60s,/early 1970s. The casinos did clean up the city some, and provided tens of thousands of jobs.

Was there the day Resorts opened. Most don't realize just how far it had fallen. It looked like a B-52 bombing practice range. Hotels were literally falling into the street. Every window broken, debris everywhere.

I had relatives in Margate in the 1970s. Going to AC was scary. White folks were not welcome anywhere off the boardwalk.

AC totally blew its chance to be the Vegas of the East. Donald Trump said 20 years ago they were going about it the wrong way; that AC was an island, and shouldve been developed as a whole "island resort". For once, I agree with the Donald.
Instead, the govt took the money and pissed it away. Now they see gaming revenues declining and just cant understand why, so they figure, "hey, lets give the new casino, the one that's going to further cannibalize this declining market, 300 mil in tax breaks"
The best barometer for AC I know of is my mother in law and her friends, who are slots mavens. They are all Total Rewards Diamond members, yet most have given up on AC and stick to the Harrah's here in PA. When I asked her why, she said "those idiots in AC are shooting themselves in the foot. Traffic to the casinos goes down, so instead of trying to entice people to visit, they tighten up all the machines to make it back from the few customers they have left. And its not like I go to AC for the ambiance and glitz (ha!), so why not stay closer to home and have a shorter drive"
From what Ive seen, non-AP players go wherever their money lasts longest, and right now, that's anywhere but AC.

Originally Posted by PhillyNewbie

slots mavens

Good laugh! Never heard that one before.

Originally Posted by njrich520

Good laugh! Never heard that one before.

I couldnt think of a way to nicely say "a bunch of glassy-eyed old blue-hairs, frantically pushing buttons to get a buffet comp"

Originally Posted by PhillyNewbie

AC totally blew its chance to be the Vegas of the East. Donald Trump said 20 years ago they were going about it the wrong way; that AC was an island, and shouldve been developed as a whole "island resort". For once, I agree with the Donald.
Instead, the govt took the money and pissed it away. Now they see gaming revenues declining and just cant understand why, so they figure, "hey, lets give the new casino, the one that's going to further cannibalize this declining market, 300 mil in tax breaks"
The best barometer for AC I know of is my mother in law and her friends, who are slots mavens. They are all Total Rewards Diamond members, yet most have given up on AC and stick to the Harrah's here in PA. When I asked her why, she said "those idiots in AC are shooting themselves in the foot. Traffic to the casinos goes down, so instead of trying to entice people to visit, they tighten up all the machines to make it back from the few customers they have left. And its not like I go to AC for the ambiance and glitz (ha!), so why not stay closer to home and have a shorter drive"
From what Ive seen, non-AP players go wherever their money lasts longest, and right now, that's anywhere but AC.

The problem with Trumps ' develop the island' approach was really quite simple. The island was already inhabited. It wasn't like you were taking an uninhabited piece of land and turning it into a resort, you were building a resort in a city that already existed.
Sure, it would have been great if you could level all the slums sex shops and 99 cent stores and built shiny new casinos in their place, but the people whose lives would be disrupted might have some objections, don't you think?
In the late 90s, one of the AC papers had a column by some local entertainer and he was saying that in the 70s, before casinos, AC was a huge magnet for the gay market and that there were two dozen bars and nightclubs there at a time when most places still frowned on them. They all closed up as greedy landlords raised rents as the town boomed. Most of them became topless clubs. He was lamenting the fact that the gay casino employees now had to go to Philadelphia and spend their money there, and that the gay tourism disappeared just at the time it was starting to become a marketable commodity.
I think where AC went wrong was that they should have given more incentives for their employees to live in AC. That would have brought a huge influx of money into the city, not just the casinos. It also would have given the casino unions a much bigger role in Atlantic City politics, and may have prevented the total corruption that occured there.

If you went to Resorts you would see lots of gays. I guess the cornered the market. I think I even saw it advertised on a billboard heading into AC the last time I went.