Things are not going so well up on the jewel of the Jersey Coast. The boom in Atlantic City is going bust for some big time players. No longer is the coastal town, so glorified in ‘Boardwalk Empire’ the Mecca of East Coast gambling as it once was.
At least two and probably three Casinos will be closing this year alone, and the future doesn’t look to be getting any brighter for the wagering business along the Atlantic Coast of New Jersey.
One of the major problems has been over building along the strip. Once there were busy Casinos obviously flourishing in Atlantic City, other investors saw the success and wanted to get in on the action. So they too built nice big, expensive casinos.
Little by little there were more Casinos in Atlantic City than there were players to fill them. Free buffets, free drinks, free rooms, they tried it all. But there just were not enough clients coming through the doors to pay all the bills and maintain a well trained, again expensive… staff when there was no one to wait on.
Imagine walking into a nice new Casino only to find more employees than clients. Most likely you would leave, and that’s what people did. All those shinny new hotels and restaurants and casinos just have not been cutting the mustard lately. Too much choice did not lead to more business, just the opposite.
The big Showboat Atlantic City Casino, which is run by Caesars Entertainment Corp., will be closing down at the end of this summer. The Atlantic Club closed in January and the Revel Casino Hotel will most likely be closing before football season this year.
The situation in Atlantic City arose in the first place because of a major marketing misjudgment by the folks building new Casinos when the old ones were not doing all that well in the first place.
Steven Perskie, the former state legislator who authored the bill to legalize Casino gaming in New Jersey back in 1977, told the press, “The market has its own rules. Regulators and economic planners can sit around and be as smart as they need to be, but at the end of the day the market is going to make that determination.”
Gaming revenues in Atlantic City reached their peak back in 2006 at over five billion dollars. For 2013 they didn’t even make it to three billion, that’s a hell of a drop off in so short a time period. So, why did they build more Casinos?
