One Less Sin in Sin City? Maybe Not Just Yet…

I don’t smoke – I never have. I’m allergic to it. It’s nasty and really bothers me to smell it, particularly when I’m eating food. That having been said, I personally felt like banning smoking in all public places in Nevada that served food and were not casinos – an outright ban, mind you, not a non-smoking dining area – was just a bad idea. People who visit here tend to be completely caught up in the spectacle that is the Las Vegas resort corridor/Las Vegas Strip area, and really aren’t privy to the other areas of the gaming industry that live and thrive here in the Valley – an industry that is very much a part of the Las Vegas lifestyle for many people.

The Gaming Commission in Nevada allows for independent owners of bars to apply for, and providing that they pass an FBI background check, liability and financial requirements, they may be granted a license to operate up to 15 video poker machines in their establishment. For most local bars and pubs, the revenue generated from these gaming machines adds up to be a large chunk of their monthly nut. For many businesses, if it weren’t for the gaming revenue, they’d have long since shut their doors.

As is common for most pubs and bars – places that serve alcohol to drink – they also provide food. This has a couple of practical purposes. For starters, it’s a reason to go there in the first place. Dinner, late night snack, steak and egg breakfast for $3.98. “Cheap Las Vegas” only exists in the local pubs, anymore. As a matter of fact, I had steak and eggs this morning at my local watering hole. People here take advantage of the steep discounts because they seem to be fewer and farther in between. Providing cheap food is obviously a lure for customers, with the owners knowing the difference will be more than covered – and then some – by some of those customers who stay around for a bit to gamble on the video poker machines. Personally, I rarely play video poker, but occasionally I will, especially if I’m out drinking with some friends, which leads us to the other reason why you provide food at bars and pubs: it slows the rate of absorption of alcohol and helps prevent you from going from zero to really drunk in under an hour. In this way, it’s something of a public service. It’s not as though anyone expects to get rich selling food, for the most part. Everyone knows how difficult the restaurant business can be.

The customer base for these pubs and bars is pretty wide-ranged, but definitely includes the massive amount of service industry people we have living in Las Vegas. From blackjack dealers to strippers, from drug dealers to late-night veterinarians, most everyone in Vegas either works, has worked, or will work an atypical shift at some point in their career. A city that doesn’t sleep has to have a huge crew of folks doing everything at 4am that they would at 3pm. Lots of people work the “swing” shift. And whenver they get off they usually don’t go straight to bed – they might very well show up at their local pub for a cheap, late-night dinner and a drink.. and maybe put $40 in the video poker machine before they leave. This is the city we created and the lifestyle that was a necessary tool to service the beast. An entire multi-billion dollar local industry has developed around providing good, reasonably priced service to the service people themselves who serve the millions that visit Las Vegas each year. And now the voters have said – and they had a different option on the ballot, mind you – that if you are one of these businesses and have invested until hundreds of thousands of dollars in establishing this sort of legal business model – too bad. Your main marketing tool – “cheap food” – is now going to either be taken away from you if you want to continue allowing smoking, or your customers in your bar to drink and let their hair down will just have to get used to not letting it down quite so far.

So having said all that, the recently election-approved total ban on smoking in public places where food is served other than full-on casino properties leaves several questions for us to consider. Do we really want to potentially sabotage this industry that has essentially one marketing tool at their disposal – cheap eats – and, do we want to create an environment where people are actually drinking and not provided food as a deterrent to over-consumption because the bar owner feels like that might be the only way to keep his customer base happy? Another interesting question is this: Does the Nevada Gaming Commission require that bars provide food of some type for that purpose and if they do does this whole thing put an undue burden on these business owners? That would be quite a catch 22. Moreover, what sort of trickle-down economic effects will be felt across the Valley if business start to falter as a result?

So with all those thoughts in mind, a group of more than twenty businesses today filed a complaint in district court. They also filed an application for a temporary restraining order against the measure taking effect on December 8th as it was scheduled to happen. Things tend to take quite awhile to play themselves out in Southern Nevada’s legal system, so who knows what will happen – but for now, that’s one sin Sin City still has going for it. We’ll see how the court responds in the coming days. Believe me, it ain’t that I’m in favor of smoking at all. I really can’t stand it.

“While Las Vegas Sleeps”   has moved to a new server over here…