Atlantic City has some new competition, or at least a refurbished version of old competition. From the AC Press:
While the atmosphere of the stylishly named Parx Casino may feature some European or Asian-inspired elegance, the crowd will have a distinctly Philly flavor. When this new $250 million slots parlor opens its doors Friday, it will replace the old Philadelphia Park Casino & Racetrack, better known to its legions of gamblers as Philly Park.Now that Pennsylvania lawmakers are on the verge of giving final approval for table games at the state’s slot parlors, Parx and its counterparts will be an even greater threat to the struggling Atlantic City market, industry officials predict.
“It just gets worse for Atlantic City. I truly believe Atlantic City is permanently disfigured,” said Justin T. Sebastiano, gaming analyst for Morgan Joseph & Co. Inc. “I certainly think table games will hurt Atlantic City.”
“Everyone is going to want to see what the little Philly Park casino has been transformed into,” spokeswoman Carrie Nork Minelli said during a tour of the new facility.Indeed, customers need only look across the parking lot to see the dramatic differences between Philly Park and Parx. Philadelphia Park’s temporary casino was a reincarnation of the warehouse-like horseracing grandstand from the 1970s.
The modernistic Parx represents the next generation of casinos in Pennsylvania’s fledgling gaming industry.Even the old Philly Park has been a formidable competitor for the Atlantic City casinos, about an hour’s drive away in good traffic. Located about 20 miles north of center-city Philadelphia, it is Pennsylvania’s top-grossing slots parlor and has been stealing customers from feeder markets once dominated by Atlantic City.
Parx lacks the soaring hotel towers that are a staple of the Atlantic City gaming resorts. But the casino floor itself is reminiscent of the glitzy Atlantic City properties. Parx also features new restaurants, bars and a nightclub to give customers more to do than just gamble.
Sebastiano might want to mix in a thesaurus. “Permanently disfigured” sounds way too graphic. It’s not like Philly Park came down and threw acid in the city’s face–the city just has more competition.
The thing is, everyone knew this was coming. Even if you continued to bank on slots not coming to Pennsylvania after it became a serious possibility in 2002/03, the legislation chartering slot gaming was signed in July 2004. Even the most skeptical Atlantic City casinos, then, have had five and a half years to get ready for “new competition.”
Las Vegas faced this same problem when California Class III Indian casinos became a reality on 2000. Las Vegas gets about a third of its visitors from California. But no one said Las Vegas was permanently disfigured: instead, most people realized if the city wanted to thrive, it had to give Californians a reason to drive past a half-dozen Indian casinos on their way to Nevada.
Can Atlantic City do the same? The city did a so-so job of reacting to the opening of Connecticut casinos in the early 1990s, but it doesn’t have a history of pro-active growth. The time to have this conversation was six years ago. Granted, some casinos–Harrah’s, Tropicana, Borgata, and the Trump Taj Mahal spring to mind–responded with expansions and adding other amenities, but the market as a whole should have stepped its game up by now.
At this point, the city’s in a position where two-thirds of its properties are playing catch-up with a slot parlor, despite a thirty-year head start.
Yes, the headline is a Fair Warning reference.