If you want to sum up how online influencers position what Las Vegas has felt like over the past 12 months, it’s this: endless handwringing about how Las Vegas is no longer friendly to the working stiff.
For example, $20 for water from a resort gift shop, not being able to get a decent dinner for less than $150 a head, buffets being shut down and turned into celebrity restaurants, and I can’t even bring myself to talk about the parking fees. In short, it’s been noticed.
Las Vegas is uniquely affected by this, because it’s always attracted two types of visitors — the whale and the average Joe/Joanne. From the latter’s perspective, anyone could turn up with $50, smile even though their big bet on red came up black, and get a free steak dinner and an upgrade to a suite.
Everyone felt important in Las Vegas. It was part of the escapism.
To someone looking from the outside in at what Las Vegas offers today, the whole deal looks — sorry to say — a bit mean-spirited. The perception is that the town doesn’t care about Joe and Joanne, but does care about someone who owns a fleet of black SUVs to take them from their private jet at Harry Reid to their penthouse suite.
But I don’t think that’s the problem. To me, the problem isn’t with Las Vegas, it’s with modern commerce.
Over the past number of years, the general premise of operating a business has become bifurcated. In order to achieve scale, there are now two types of interaction between a customer and a business: in-person and digital.
This has created, across all businesses in all industries, a pressure around what the customer journey looks like. Requiring that the business has a human fronting their customer interactions is expensive compared to having a piece of software (usually a website or an app) do that.
As such, “global commerce generally” now seems to “process-ize” every interaction and have everything done with as few human beings in the chain as possible. Scale, particularly when delivered through information systems, requires homogenization of every interaction. Every customer has to look as similar as possible to every other one and every flow has to have roughly the same shape. The issue however is that it turns out this works, it does return greater value to shareholders, and now it’s everywhere.
In order to achieve the financial shape and growth that modern businesses are under pressure to deliver, individualized customer experiences have to fall away. From there, you get three types of businesses: those that deal only in light-touch system-based interactions; those that deal only in high-touch white-glove interactions; and those that try and cater to both, which is the hardest trick to pull off.
To deliver those commercial objectives, “light-touch” requires a huge number of customers delivering a small amount of profit in real terms (but who hardly ever see or interact with the humans in the business), while “high-touch” requires a very small number of customers that deliver a huge amount of profit in real terms (but will only do so if they feel beloved and important). Does this seem recognizable to what the Las Vegas offer looks like today?
To me, in my job as a CTO outside the gambling industry, this pattern is highly recognizable. Of course, my hotel-casino wants me to check in with an app. After all, I specifically went out of my way to get the cheapest room possible and I’m at the lowest tier of the players card program. (This isn’t shade – I do this as my standard operating procedure when visiting Las Vegas.) I understand that a 10- to 15-minute interaction with a receptionist trims away the profit. But the approach feels … off. I still want that interaction. I want to feel special.
Many of us know that few commercial relationships we’re involved with these days feel quite right. None of us feel important anymore, regardless of how much money we’re handing over. It all feels … extractive. Hotels, airlines, bars, restaurants — everyone does this now.
Las Vegas is uniquely affected, because the town grew up as the antithesis of this idea. The problem is that Las Vegas was founded on an implicit social contract that was explicitly democratic in a way that these other industries never were. Today, however, unless you’re an ultra-VIP, you’re just a transaction. As corporate owners of casino operators come under pressure to look and behave like corporate owners of every other type of business, Joe and Joanne become lines on a spreadsheet and only the people with real money to spend get all the personal attention.
