New Jersey’s ‘Boardwalk Empire’ is going from bad to worse. Building and running a casino is a risky business in the best of times. Competition for gamblers is stiff and operators are forced into more and more expenditures in order to attract business.
The old expression ‘no expense was spared’ took on new meaning when investors in Atlantic City decided to build a new hotel-casino complex on the strip that cost over $2.4 billion… and the place is beautiful… a showcase of the latest industry offerings, dressed in their Sunday best.
Casino gambling in Atlantic City has been popular with locals and tourists alike for the past 36 years. There have been some impressive successes, and some big time failures. But nothing, absolutely nothing, can compare to the closing last week of the Revel Casino & Hotel. How could such a thing have happened?
The spectacular Revel operated in Atlantic City for just a little over two years after opening with high hopes of revitalizing the struggling gambling market there on the strip. But it didn’t work out, and now they can’t even sell the building… or the business.
In two years operating in Atlantic City, the Revel never showed a profit, not one single month. One wonders how such intelligent people could make such a blunder. It couldn’t all be racked up to bad management, that can be fixed. Not having enough players coming through the doors, that’s a much harder fix to manage.
To make things worse for the State of New Jersey, and Atlantic City in particular, the Revel was joined by two other prominent casinos in closing its doors to the public and shutting down the roulette wheels and the blackjack tables forever in their exclusive, all inclusive casinos.
Many point to a spate of overbuilding in the past five years that has left the area with more casino floors than there were players to fill them. The Showboat Casino Hotel and the sumptuous Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino also shut their doors for lack of business.
These could not have been easy decisions on the part of the respective managements of the properties, but the fact that three big casinos fell almost simultaneously gives evidence that there was something gravely wrong with their business plans.
The amount of investment money lost of the three closings in staggering and the news for Atlantic City and New Jersey is even worse.
