Maybe go into another business?

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

‘Maybe the owners of the gigantic and mega-glitzy Encore Boston Harbor casino, in the formerly industrial city of Everett, should get out of the saturated southern New England casino racket and stick to the bus and boat business. Instead of the originally projected $1 billion revenue for 2019, Encore appears headed for only $600 million. They must be praying there won’t be any big snow and ice storms between now and the end of the year. I wonder what will happen in the next recession. Maybe it will be good for casinos because suckers will become that much more desperate for a quick killing.

To drum up its business by waving the banners of bonanzas to cure their customers’ financial anxieties, Encore is now offering free parking, free bus trips to the palace on the Mystic River waterfront and very cheap boat travel. Its boat service is heartening – the more commuter boats the better on Boston Harbor.

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With the long and confusing war between IGT and Twin River over the Rhode Island gambling business, one almost wants the state to get rid of these middlemen and go directly into the casino business itself, sort of like the liquor stores owned and operated by some states. Reduce the layers of corruption and cut operating costs!

Noxious vapors

Various e-smoking devices, including a disposable e-cigarette, a rechargeable e-cigarette, a medium-size tank device, large-size tank devices, an e-cigar and an e-pipe.

— Wikipedia image

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Considering the delicious hypocrisy involved in such things, I got a chuckle out of the debate over whether to stop the sale of vaping products because of illnesses associated with the stuff.

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker has imposed a four-month ban on the sale of these products in the commonwealth, during which time the health hazards associated with them will be studied. A little late, eh? And Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo has directed the state Department of Health to prohibit the sale of flavored e-cigarettes.

Governor Baker said: “The use of e-cigarettes and marijuana vaping products is exploding, and we are seeing reports of serious lung illnesses, particularly in our young people.’’ There’s no sense of irony, despite the fact that regular tobacco cigarettes are perfectly legal for adults to buy and far more dangerous than e-cigarettes! Can I buy you a pack of lung cancer and emphysema? But then, the states want the tax money from the sale of the old-fashioned cigs.

Likewise, most states take in vast quantities of money from lotteries and, increasingly, casino operations. Politicians love gambling-related revenue, as they love cigarette taxes, because it helps them avoid raising broad-based taxes. But I suspect that the full social costs of state-promoted gambling in crime, family breakups, bankruptcies, etc., far, far outweigh the revenue benefits of states getting into bed with casino operators and companies such as IGT that serve the gambling industry.

And the entire sector is, by the nature of its services and relations with government, intrinsically corrupt. It’s also highly regressive since desperate poorer people tend to gamble far more than the affluent do.

And poorer people tend to smoke more than richer ones, in part to treat the anxiety associated with economic insecurity and low status.

Casino cannibalization?

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

The casino mania continues apace, with the latest scheme being a proposal to build a slots palace, and, incredibly, horse track, in Wareham, near the Bourne Bridge, the western road access to Cape Cod. If you think Cape traffic is bad now…. (I used to love horse tracks but not so much now that I know more about how some of the animals are treated.)

But wait! There’s more! A Chicago developer called Neil Bluhm continues to push for a casino in poor old Brockton, once “The Shoe Capital of the World’’; the Mashpee Wampanoag Indians still want to put up a casino in Taunton, once “The Silver City,’’ and the Aquinnah Wampanoag Indians continue to demand a gambling joint on Martha’s Vineyard near the famously colorful clay cliffs called Gay Head.

As our region continues to move toward casino cannibalization it looks like IGT, the gambling systems tech company, is a better, well, bet for Rhode Island than Twin River, more of whose suckers may decide to take their chances at the other nearby casinos to pop up. Of course, that’s already happening at the huge and glitzy Encore mega casino in the traditionally poor and gritty inner Boston suburb of Everett. Encore seems to have an especially potent allure for high rollers at its table games, and there are plenty of rich people in the region.

Still, I think a lot of the folks from southeastern New England flocking to Encore right now are going there mostly out of curiosity. When that fades, and winter weather arrives, making travel to Greater Boston even more unpleasant than it is now, I think that will fade a bit, even with such come-ons as the luxury bus service between Gillette Stadium and Encore.

Anyway, IGT, as an international tech company serving a wide customer base, would seem a sturdier reed for Rhode Island to lean on for economic development than one casino company – that is, if IGT actually stays in the Ocean State! Corporate promises about staying in localities and states that have offered companies assorted incentives such as tax breaks tend to evaporate remarkably often.

Meanwhile, we’ll see what the effects of online sports betting on casinos turn out to be….