Some folks had been concerned that Illinois' casinos would loose business after the state went smoke free at the beginning of this year. Indeed, the casino lobbyists seized on this January's casino earnings numbers (lower across the board), to make that very argument. They claimed that the numbers fell between ten and twenty percent when compared to the same period last year. As always, smoking proponents claimed this as proof that Illinois' smoke-free casinos were loosing business to neighboring states' casinos which were not similarly burdened.
At the time many of us pointed out that this January both the economy and the weather continued to tank. As a casino patron myself, I pointed out that I wasn't going to drive to the boats in a blizzard. As a general rule, if weather is so rotten that people can't make it to work, few will leave the warmth of their homes on a gaming excursion.... It sure looked like casinos were more affected by an act of nature rather than by the Smoke-Free Illinois Act!
Sure enough, updated numbers show that business fell everywhere, not just smoke-free Illinois. In fact, some casinos in neighboring states fared even worse. Below I am attaching links to a couple of articles that provide some of the numbers. While I'll wait to see more before doing the full "I told you so," the information from these articles makes me comfortable enough to "double down" on my initial assertion that when it comes to Smoke-Free Illinois, gambling lobbyists are just blowing smoke....
Check out the articles I mentioned:
Monday, March 24, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment