In a characteristic about-face, former nightlife enthusiast Steve Wynn is belittling Millenials (“sort of short on brains”), social media (“dim-witted time”), while conceding the importance of non-gaming revenue to today’s Las Vegas. Said Wynn of the 
nightlife generation, “we’re doing well with them. We put the little darlings in the nightclubs. It’s probably the only part of the business where I have cognitive dissonance. I walk into the clubs and I say to myself, either we have attracted every moron in the world, or there’s something about the sound that allows normal people to check their human sensibilities at the door.” Or maybe it’s all that Axe body spray.
Simultaneously, Wynn sounded surprisingly dismissive of casino revenue, the bedrock of his industry until The Mirage came along in 1989 and changed the game. “Gaming is a passive activity. It has no value. One roulette table is exactly the same as every other damn roulette table. A gaming room has no dynamic value. It’s strictly a receptacle, a cash register. The driver in our business is the non-casino activity. The driver in our business is the experiential value of the enterprise.” I would argue that the same applies to gambling, too. The casino industry is a strange one in that it produces no product of tangible value, just experiences.
* Horseshoe Baltimore enjoyed a spectacular May, up 31% and grossing $29 million. While main rival Maryland Live was relatively flat, up 2%, its $59 million gross was the envy of the state. Having owner David Cordish randomly handing out $100 bills on the casino floor can’t hurt. Golden Entertainment‘s rural Rocky Gap Casino Resort was up 4% ($4 million) while Penn National Gaming continues to struggle at Hollywood Casino Perryville, which once looked like a sure thing but was 3% down ($7 million) last month.
* After months in limbo, the fate of Atlantic City‘s defunct Showboat casino-hotel has been resolved. Developer Bart Blatstein will reopen the 852-room property as a pure 
hotel play, starting in July, catching most of the high season on the Boardwalk. Atlantic City experts took varying views of Blatstein’s move. Global Gaming Business Publisher Roger Gros was a skeptic, saying, “even as a casino, Showboat had a very low occupancy rate in the off season. Rooms were going for $29 a night the last winter before it closed … But he didn’t invest all that much, and with only 200 employees it might work.” Retorting that the last thing Atlantic City needed was more gaming capacity, Gaming USA Corp. President Alan Woinski said, “Even though you can still find cheap rooms midweek, they do need more hotel rooms for peak periods such as summer, teachers convention, special events and weekends.” We wish Blatstein nothing but good luck.
* Gaming analysts who once predicted Macao casino revenues would hit $80 billion by 2018 are published more chastened forecasts now, predicting $38 billion by 2020. As Las Vegas learned the hard way, you can’t build it and they will come when adverse economic forces are at work.
