I had a similar impression, particularly about hotel rates. Then I spent $300/night to stay at the Hard Rock. The all-you-can-ear buffets are cheap. And you can get drink for "free" on the gaming floors. (Does that supply around the cheap slots?)
The irony is I can ear very, very little.
Have only been there on business, didn't notice any particular extortion. But was expensing everything and not gambling or otherwise recreating. Loathe the place.
My philosophy on Vegas is "don't go to fucking Vegas."
After one visit, I'm with you. (Buck had a conference, and I figured I'd go along for the hell of it. Not actually fun. The fact that it was literally four thousand degrees Kelvin outdoors was part of the problem.)
Not the high end casinos but there's all the slightly off strip stuff that can only attract people with low prices. Steak and egg breakfast $3.99, lobster tail dinner $9.99.
When I was 8 years old I won $12 in a slot machine. Then they kicked me out of the casino. I haven't been back since.
Your picture is probably still posted at the entrance.
I think there was indeed a time when everything in Las Vegas was cheap. Not sure when it ended. Maybe all the cheap moved to Reno.
It ended when Vegas stopped being mostly a gambling destination; around when they started building the goofy strip hotels like Excalibur and the Luxor.
The one time I was in Vegas I stayed at a Motel 6 near the Strip and it was shockingly expensive for a Motel 6. I'm sure it would have been cheaper to stay at one of the casinos, but that didn't occur to me at the time.
The one I stayed at in Reno was much cheaper.
I stayed downtown and didn't gamble. #UnfoggedVegasExperiences
I didn't gamble, but I did walk down the Strip and wandered around a couple of the casinos. I also drove around town and saw some of the generic Sunbelt-sprawly areas tourists don't usually go to. It's an interesting city.
11: Yeah. The inexpensive basics are a once upon a time thing, hasn't been that way for some time now.
I've traveled on business to Vegas, Reno, and Atlantic city. Hotel rooms in casinos are all very cheap on weekday nights when there are no conventions. Vegas around $40/night, the others lower. Times that you want to be there, not so much. Other than the hotel rooms, prices seem normal.
A college acquaintance grew up close to AC. He literally got paid for going home for the weekend: the free casino bus (three hour trip) from a senior center near campus gave everyone a roll of quarters when they got off the bus.
Only casino I've ever been in was a Tribal one near the airport of a Northern midwestern city. My nephew was getting married and put us all up, or got a group rate anyway, and had the reception there too.
Does that kind of thing go on in Vegas and AC? Is the economics similar so that what I saw would be transferable?
I don't know about the economics of it, but the culture of getting married in Vegas is completely different.
I haven't been to Vegas since the 80s. Haven't stayed in Reno since the 90s, but I did drive through on my way down 395 and stopped at a Burger King somewhere on the outskirts. The price was not remarkable.
10, 11: It ended when Robert DeNiro made them start putting the same amount of blueberries in every single muffin.
18.1 sounds like it might be a casino in which a friend of mine is Deputy Director of Entertainment, or something similarly high-falutin', which basically means he books the bands from the casino circuit to play there and attract old Xers or whoever the casino thinks isn't gambling as much as they should.
When I was a little kid and we'd drive from Kansas to California to see my grandma, my parents always commented that the Nevada motels were always so cheap because they thought you'd spend more on gambling. I'm sure they were right about the prices, whatever the reason, because we were really pinching pennies.
But these were the little, edge of town strip motels. I have no idea what luxury Vegas places did back then.
Do even small Nevada hotels still have a slot machine or two in the lobby? I remember that being a feature of visiting the state when I was a kid.
Obligatory:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c1BQkKUsx0
24: I made the same trip, but starting in Nebraska. We stayed at that well known Vegas standby, the LaQuinta.
The Pinball Hall of Fame (off the beaten path, near UNLV) was fun.
24/27: Us, too. I remember my father returning with a big cup of change one year. I thought it was a big deal - it was probably $20 or something in retrospect. He'd leave the kids with my mother and spend the complimentary quarters/nickels/whatever in a slot machine, then come back to the room.
Friends in DC take monthly trips to Vegas because airfare is relatively cheap, and they seem to find reasonable deals on rooms. AFAICT they spend their weekends betting on college sports and drinking. I'm amazed that it's still fun for them after several years.
The 1980s sees ownership go from a family-owned model (or Family-owned) to corporate. MGM grand, Steve Wynn get in the game and make every loss leader a profit center. I think this is the turn that is mourned in Casino, although I haven't seen it.
Yeah, I had the perception of things being not absurdly priced in Reno.
Curious, was it basically the fact that they were closest to California's metropoles that Vegas and Reno were invested in as the gambling capitals after legalization? I had always assumed that, but just ran the numbers and it's pretty incredible: of Nevada's population growth between 1920 and 1990, 86% was in the two counties Clark and Washoe. Partial evidence for the hypothesis, Washoe accounted for more of the growth as of 1940, before LA really took off.
22 to 30? I haven't seen the movie either, but I assume that was the reference.
31: Have you seen the rest of Nevada? 86% doesn't surprise me that much. Lots of it is beautiful, but not really urbanly or agriculturally inhabitable.
33: Yeah, if you look at Arizona it's basically the same situation with Phoenix and Tucson. A mostly uninhabitable state leads to growth being concentrated in a couple of urban areas, at least as long as they can keep drinking the Colorado River. The tourist economy is big in Vegas but the city's huge enough to have other things going on. Phoenix is probably the closest comparison, and has a similar story of endless subdivisions being built on cheap land in the oughts before turning into ghost towns post-2008.
25: And slot machines in the grocery stores, and slot machines at the 7-11, and slot machines at the airport... every time I fly home to visit my parents in Reno I end up at this one gate next to my especial bête noire, which shouts "WHEEL... OF... FORTUNE" every 60 seconds.
33: Wasn't that sort of the case for Las Vegas too before the Hoover Dam was built, though?
36: Not to quite the same extent; even before the dam proximity to the Colorado gave southern Nevada more agricultural potential than most other parts of the state. Vegas itself didn't really take off until well after the dam was built, of course.
||Apparently the redeye flight I'm on is overbooked. That seems crazy to me. Who wants to take an SFO-ORD Saturday night redeye? I thought redeyes were usually half empty.|>
Why do you want to take an SFO-ORD Saturday night redeye?
I had a short trip so wanted a full working day on Saturday, but still need to be back to teach Monday morning. So it was Saturday redeye or sometime Sunday. The redeye was much cheaper, it takes another flight and an hour drive to get home after arriving, so flying tomorrow wastes almost the whole day.
Presumably most of the other people on the flight had similar considerations in mind when they booked it.
Also I missed the fare I wanted (cheap and out of Oakland Sunday morning) by a couple minutes, so this was the best remaining option. But anyway the point is that my desire to be here all day Saturday to work is not something I'd expect to be common.
Well the cheap and oversold with availability tomorrow morning means they algorithms screwed up. So it must be a little unusual.
Maybe some people wanted to be there all day Saturday for other reasons.
Anyway, the redeyes I fly tend to be pretty crowded (because Alaska), but I've never seen one actually be overbooked, so 43 is probably right.
The irony is that there's 3 extra people and the plane has four empty but permanently blocked off seats. (150 seats is 3 flight attendants and 154 would be 4.). So I still have an empty seat next to me.
Ha. Air travel is so weird in so many ways.
Which reminds me that I should probably give an update on how my five flights this week went. Four went fine, but the fifth was delayed six hours because the plane had mechanical problems and they had to send another one from Anchorage.
What I should have done was tried to get them to switch me to the Miami redeye. It's a longer flight so I could actually sleep, and I wouldn't get in that late. Plus more miles. But it's too late for me to be smart enough to think of that.
Hotel rooms in casinos are all very cheap on weekday nights when there are no conventions. Vegas around $40/night, the others lower. Times that you want to be there, not so much. Other than the hotel rooms, prices seem normal.
This has been my experience as well. I've not encountered outrageous prices for anything other than obvious tourist trap stuff. I even had frozen yoguhurt, or at least gelato, at perfectly sane prices in the Venetian, which is one of the higher end casinos. But hotel room aside (ca. $30 a night pre-and post-2008, though the latter was off-strip), nothing but the buffet was particularly cheap either.
I had a dream last night that there was a new program giving people sabbaticals from relationships. I was apprehensive about whether the person they'd get to cover my parenting would do a good enough job, but my bigger worry was that I wouldn't be able to come up with a good enough proposal to improve myself during my time off and that even if I did I'd just squander the time and end up a worse person.
I had a dream last night that the coffee maker was flooding and I couldn't find the plunger to make it stop.
a new program giving people sabbaticals from relationships.
Do we break up? Do I move out? Do we just do this while we're living in the same house together? And we kind of came up with this idea of borrowing this Amish concept called rumspringa. And rumspringa in the Amish world is when you're 16, you're allowed to be not Amish for two years. And then when you turn 18, you decide whether or not you come back to the fold.
I don't remember my dream, but there were definitely some action-movie elements and a little sex.
We had a conference at this casino/hotel last week in Tahoe. Kind of depressing crowd at that thing mid week in the off season. Their calendar of entertainment seemed big on butt rocker bands and swingery looking things like "boats and hoes", "cougars and cubs night", etc. Tahoe in theory could have been an awesome trip but school's started so my wife couldn't come along and I was planning on maybe staying an extra day and doing some fly fishing in the area until I found out the Tahoe basin's season ends in September. Boo.
I had a dream last night that involved getting mauled by a kitten. It latched onto my thumb and I was beating it against a wall and it was like super zombie kitten and would not let go. I finally got it off and lost a huge chunk of my thumb in the process.
I dreamed last night that I arrived at JFK late in the evening after two flights and plenty o' waiting, only to discover surly, slow-moving immigration officers and an außer Betrieb AirTrain.
Wait, that was no dream. That was real!
56: I've been binge-watching The Walking Dead, but I can't say I've had any zombie dreams because of it.
Season premiere this evening! I've turned at least one person from 'Eh - can't stand zombie shows' to 'Walking Dead continuing with the marathon? yeah? Huh, what's going on?'
Oh, and the conference in 55 was opened with a prayer in which the speaker thanked God for allowing us to be "warriors against evil". Uh, what? Dude, it's an auto theft conference.
I wouldn't have expected chop shoppers to be doing it for Jesus. Shows what I know.
"Take this and sell it, for this is my engine."
61: "Ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long".
Put on the full chrome armour of God, brothers, and set the pedal to the metal in Christ's holy name, setting out for the edge of town where Sally's father doesn't approve of me because I work in that old factory sorry my sermon turned into a Bruce Springsteen song but you guys get the gist, right?
||
Ok I am watching Gilmore Girls because there are seven seasons of it and I like mainlining things but I think I maybe can't be in the same universe as Melissa McCarthy's character for one more episode.
|>
Late to the conversation, but I was in Reno for a convention a couple years ago and didn't find it to be either unusually cheap or expensive. The casinos seemed to be basically convention-hotel level expensive (not cheap at all, that is.)
Pretty expensive:
A Virgin Atlantic pilot who blew 'prodigious sums' in Las Vegas casinos while masterminding a £30m mortgage fraud has been jailed for 14 years. Mark Entwistle, 47, recruited corrupt solicitors and accountants to approve scores of his bogus loan applications. Masquerading as a successful property developer in Windsor, Entwistle instead used the huge sums to support his high-rolling lifestyle. He then blew swathes of cash on gambling website Betfair and on the tables in Las Vegas, holding platinum membership at both Bellagio's and Caesar's Palace. - See more at: http://www.courtnewsuk.co.uk/newsgallery/#sthash.3214RDsv.dpuf