Lost Vegas
The Gaming Center Of The Universe
It is amazing to me how rigged Las Vegas is for making money.
I remember, up until about 10 years ago, if you went to Las Vegas, everything was really cheap. This included hotel rooms, food, alcohol and taxi cabs. I believe the logic was that they wanted to do everything they could to make you comfortable so you would gamble and lose your money.
This is not the case anymore–at all. If there is a big convention in town, all the hotel rooms go up significantly in price, which is understandable. When I say go up in price, I mean they more than triple in price.
The most interesting thing is that you can still get a decent room for $40 a night, but they charge you an additional $18, for what is referred to as a "resort fee." This is bizarre to me because the hotel we stayed in said part of the resort fee was for complimentary internet access, but it is not complimentary if I have to pay $18 a day for it, not to mention, it was often slow as molasses, and the hotel did not even offer wireless internet access!?!?!?
I mean c'mon it's 2013!!! Everybody has an iPad, iPhone and wireless laptop, but they are too cheap to install a wireless system? Why? They don't want you in your hotel room, on the internet when you can be drinking and gambling away your hard earned money.
We went to see Cirque du Soleil and it was over $150 per ticket for nose-bleed seating. I mean it would have looked more impressive watching it on a TV set.
Everything in Vegas is optimized to take your money. After my girlfriend and I saw Cirque du Soleil, we wandered through the casino and she said "Hey, do you want to play penny slot machines!?!, to which I said "No", since I don't gamble. She said c'mon, let's have some fun. She made me sit down next to her at "Sex In The City" themed slot computer, she handed me a dollar bill which I refused to insert in the machine. She put a five dollar bill in her machine, and in less than 30 seconds it was gone, and she grabbed the $1 bill she gave me and put it in my machine which was gone in a few seconds.
I was just stunned at how expensive everything was in Las Vegas!!! The hotel we stayed in charged $9 for a bottle of water that would normally be about $1. Even the Starbucks charged almost double for everything. Even all the taxi-cabs charge a $3 fee if you want to pay with a credit card!!! Scam, Scam, Scam.
The supreme irony is that if you study Las Vegas, you realize that there are obviously full-time employees who do nothing but figure out how to take advantage of guests.
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