Breaking news out of the NY Times: casinos like Asian high rollers:
Casino operators have long recognized that a large number of Asians, especially Chinese and Chinese-Americans, are avid gamblers. For years, casinos have dispatched special buses to any Chinatown within a day’s drive.
Recently, though, casinos have become much more aggressive in wooing Asians both domestically and abroad. They are aiming not just at the newly wealthy from China, who in recent years have emerged as Las Vegas’s best customers, but also Asian-Americans and recent immigrants from the Pacific Rim.
The vigor of their efforts is stirring the ire of some Asian activists and others. “If the casinos singled out African-Americans and marketed to them as heavily as they do Asians, I’d imagine there’d be this huge political outcry,” said Timothy W. Fong, co-director of the Gambling Studies Program at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The marketing has been so aggressive, and the penetration so deep, we’re starting to see alarming increases in the rates of problem gambling among Asians.”
These efforts include redesigning large portions of a casino floor to cater to the tastes of Asian guests; advertisements written in Asian dialects and placed in community newspapers in nearby cities; and mailers written in a recipient’s native language. The impact has been especially heavy among recent immigrants, Dr. Fong said.
From the tone of the article, you’d think that this has all happened in the last year, but anyone who’s even been near a casino in the past ten years has got to know that this is a pretty old phenomenon. The first junket trips from Asia date back to the 1970s, and by the late 1990s at the latest casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City were making serious efforts to court Asian high rollers. Anyone remember who the MGM Grand (allegedly) removed the big lion entrance because Asian high rollers thought it unlucky? That was more then ten years ago.
I’ve got at least one factual quibble: the Trump Taj Mahal’s Asian gaming area wasn’t opened last year–they just moved it from what is now, I think, the Ego lounge to the former pit 6 in front of the main cage. This is the kind of thing that’s not really news to anyone who’s gone to a casino.
Still, it’s an interesting read, as Rivlin’s stuff usually is, and the problem gambling aspect is certainly a different one from what you usually hear.