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Every time I come across posts<\/a> or articles about the general downward trends of Las Vegas tourism, I just scoff and remind myself to hold my tongue and save it for the brog, because I think I\u2019m in the minority now about my feelings and attitude about Las Vegas.<\/span><\/p>\n But as the subject of this post says, Las Vegas sucks now, and is a far cry from the place that I used to go to multiple times a year, and it makes me sad to see just how much it\u2019s changed and how I just now have absolutely no desire to go back any time soon.\u00a0 And like I said, I think I\u2019m in the minority here, especially among my friends who all seem to think the place is still good, regardless of if they acknowledge the changes or not, and as to not be the Debbie Downer, I more often than not, keep my feelings unspoken since I don\u2019t want to be accused of peeing in the pool.<\/span><\/p>\n But yeah, Las Vegas sucks now, and I fully understand why their tourism and revenues are trending downwards, and feel little opinion other than the euphemism that this is the bed they made, and they have to lay in it.<\/span><\/p>\n Sure, COVID had a lot to do with their state of collapse, as a city so reliant on tourism was absolutely decimated when the whole world was encouraged to stay put, but the whole city didn\u2019t do themselves any favors once things started to return to normalcy.\u00a0 It\u2019s like the whole place went into this determined recoup-mode, and decided to up the cost of just about everything in sight in order to make up for lost dollars from the pandemic, and as often the case whenever any business raises costs to justify something, once that something has been justified, they grow so used the revenues that they make no attempt to revert or reduce, and as is the case with Vegas, they actually doubled down and kept increasing the cost of everything to further push people to see how much they can get away with.<\/span><\/p>\n See, the Vegas I remember and loved, it wasn\u2019t $Fuck you.99 per night to stay anywhere on the Strip, and there weren\u2019t Ticketmaster-amounts of resort fees every night.\u00a0 Parking was often free, which justified getting a rental car so we didn\u2019t have to get taxis everywhere, and could occasionally explore the city beyond the Strip.\u00a0 Food, sure, had its upscale joints where you could feel like a baller, but there were also plenty of options where you could get a cheap meal or just enough to satiate hunger, and it not be an automatic $100+ bill.<\/span><\/p>\n Every resort had a buffet, and I can say that I\u2019d been to almost all of them at various points of my life, from the Riviera\u2019s, Aladdin\u2019s, MGM\u2019s, Mandalay Bay\u2019s, and my guiltiest of pleasures was the Rio\u2019s Carnival World Buffet, where on two different times, separated by years, I managed to get the same server who had this creepy, Igor-like demeanor, but was still nice and did his job well.\u00a0 But, they\u2019re all gone now, with to my knowledge, the only ones truly left and worth a damn, being like Caesar\u2019s Palace, Bellagio and Cosmopolitan.<\/span><\/p>\n Drinks were plentiful, and thankfully is still the case, free as long as you\u2019re gambling, but for when you weren\u2019t blowing all your money away, a domestic beer didn\u2019t cost $20 plus a tip.<\/span><\/p>\n Which brings us to gambling, where across the board, the cost to play has risen to where the last two times I went to Vegas, I was basically done after a single day\u2019s gambling.\u00a0 I used to be able to bring $500 in cash, and manage to have a pretty fun long weekend; I could be lucky enough to play with some house case from time to time, and when the trips were over, be able to come back with a little left.\u00a0 Now, $500 can\u2019t get me through a single day, which was almost literal when my last trip was just 24-hours, with gambling time being less than four of those hours.<\/span><\/p>\n Casinos hardly bother with fluctuating table minimums anymore, and the lowest on the Strip is like $15, which is a perfectly uneven number to where anyone who wants to play a hundo, has almost no possibly way of playing an exact amount at $15 a hand or spin of anything without having an embarrassing remainder, or need to buy back in, and it makes me think of the New York MTA and how their fares are mathematically strategized so that it\u2019s almost impossible to zero out a fare card, and the city rakes in millions a year on forfeited remainders.<\/span><\/p>\n The bottom line is that Las Vegas has completely abandoned even remotely trying to cater to anyone that isn\u2019t at the very least, upper class, or can at least pretend to be for the duration of a trip.\u00a0 Middle-class and lower schmucks like me can no longer afford to go there comfortably, much less have a good time, when we\u2019re being gauged left and right, having the city wishing they could charge us to breathe.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019m of the belief that there\u2019s way more money to be made in catering to everyone, and my favorite stories in business are always ones where companies have embarked on such strategies and have found immense amounts of success in doing such, like sports teams that lower their tickets, concessions and accessibility and then they make record profits.\u00a0 Apps that are released for free, but then rake in millions on ad revenue and in-game micro-transactions.\u00a0 Look at Wal-Mart, whose last time I checked was #1 on the Fortune 500 for the last 30 years, because they cater to the lower class, and they make fuck numbers of profits every year in doing so.<\/span><\/p>\n And Las Vegas turning their back to those under the upper class line, screams of elitism, catering to the wealthy and those arrogant enough to demand exclusivity, I enjoy reading and seeing things about how their numbers aren\u2019t doing as hot as they probably wish they were doing.\u00a0 I love reading comments full of shade and criticisms from people who feel similarly to how I do, abandoned and resentful, and pining for a Las Vegas that they once loved so much, they used to \u201cjoke\u201d with their friends about exploring looking for a rental property.<\/span><\/p>\n Like I said, this is the bed that they made, and it\u2019s what they have to lay in, and I hope that one day, Las Vegas can get back to closer to being the city I once loved and hopefully in time for me to have some more memorable trips with my friends and my family.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every time I come across posts or articles about the general downward trends of Las Vegas tourism, I just scoff and remind myself to hold my tongue and save it for the brog, because I think I\u2019m in the minority now about my feelings and attitude about Las Vegas. But as the subject of this … Continue reading Las Vegas sucks now, plain and simple<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[79,100,194,45,56,152,129,83,52,99,65,190],"class_list":["post-50787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-cashmoney","tag-comparison","tag-coronavirus","tag-fail","tag-food","tag-gambling","tag-nostalgia","tag-observations","tag-owned","tag-reminiscing","tag-travel","tag-white-people"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50787"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50787\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50789,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50787\/revisions\/50789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}