We’ve seen a lot of recent failures in the gambling industry within the United States. The Trump Taj Mahal recently went out of business following a line of bad management and strikes. The New Jersey campaigners have largely given up on expanding the industry in the country due to a massive amount of opposition that has popped up in the polls. Legalizing online gambling has been a far stretch that has seen very little progress in years. In fact, one of the largest gambling cities in the United States, Atlantic City, is reporting a declining gambling industry that has been on the rocks for quite some time. Does this perhaps indicate that casinos and gambling are meant to fail in the United States?
A new proposal would make it so that gambling could expand outside of Atlantic City and be introduced in other parts of New Jersey, specifically the northern region. However, it has very few specific details outlined such as – where the casinos are going to be built, how much in government revenue would the taxes on these businesses produce, and where the increased revenue would even go. These types of open proposals consistently fail and usually result in disastrous situations.
However, lawmakers still want to push gambling laws in order to allow for casinos to increase their revenue in a declining industry. Current gambling laws appear disastrous on the eastern coast of the United States, which doesn’t help the cause at all. In fact, the only place in the world that casinos are doing well is in Vegas, but this is largely articulated to the online gambling market more so than the land based ones.
Atlantic City is a good case example of how unstable the gambling industry is right now. They have closed out four of the twelve casinos in their city and have a fifth casino on its way out the door at the end of the month. As casinos close down it will make it easier for other casinos in the area to continue to operate due to the reduced competition, so it’s likely that this closing stream is going to stop at some point. Nevertheless, the market just isn’t what it used to be and less and less people are turning to gambling for entertainment.
Perhaps the biggest concern is with millennials. They are far less interested in traditional forms of gambling as previous generations were, and don’t have as much money to spend on entertainment either. This is actually largely suggested as the contributing factor to the downfall of Atlantic City.
One of the current New Jersey lawmaker’s proposal is to bail out casinos in Atlantic City, which seems counterproductive to an industry that is falling.
Is this the result of gambling in itself being less popular, or is it perhaps just the current way that the United States does it? If we look overseas at Great Britain we will find a very large and growing industry, which does make us wonder if it’s the industry itself or the lawmakers.
Either way, it is without a doubt that outside of Vegas gambling in the United States is steadily declining and current policies don’t give operators enough freedoms to save it.
