Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you.
Posted on 08/07/2025 8:47:22 AM PDT by Red Badger
Vegas was better when the Mafia ran it. There, we said it.
Back then, the city wasn’t a soulless corporate cash machine; it was a destination built for working-class Americans to have a good time, blow off some steam, and feel like high-rollers for a weekend. The Mafia understood their customers because they were their customers. They knew you didn’t nickel-and-dime a guy on his way to the blackjack table. You gave him cheap rooms, free drinks, affordable and abundant buffets, and enough glitz to make him feel like a big shot for a few days. The real money came from the action inside the casino, and they knew how to keep you coming back for more.
But corporate-run Vegas doesn’t operate that way. Once the stuffy suits took over, the city shifted from hospitality to exploitation. Everything became about maximizing shareholder value instead of giving Joe Blow an unforgettable weekend. Now, in 2025, Vegas is pushing resort fees, paid parking, $30 cocktails, $100 show tickets, inflated table minimums, and slot machines tightened to the point of absurdity. Now, every little thing bleeds you dry before you ever get a chance to feel like a big shot and enjoy yourself. And for the working-class crowd that once made the heart of Vegas tick, those days are long gone. Vegas today is designed to Hoover your wallet dry while giving you less in return.
The old Mob-run Vegas wasn’t perfect, and we’re not trying to glorify organized crime, but they knew the golden rule: keep the customer happy and they’ll keep coming back. The Mob cared about loyalty. They wanted you to leave feeling like you had a great time, even if you lost your shirt. Corporate Vegas doesn’t care if you ever come back. They just want to squeeze every last dime out of you while you’re there. And the result of that soulless mindset is a city that once had character and charm but now has become a sterile, overpriced, corporate strip mall with neon lights.
BroBible:
Las Vegas is dying. Fewer and fewer people are willing to spend a small fortune to visit a tourist destination that seems to get more and more expensive by the day, if not the hour.
Meanwhile, the city itself continues to ignore reality!
Blame is placed on others. Las Vegas chooses not to look internally.
Hotel occupancy rates dropped 14.6% year over year in the month of June. They were down 12.3% through the first 19 days of July.
MGM made major cuts at many of its top properties in May after tourism numbers saw a steep decline in April. Casinos were panicking in February because the gambling-focused city was empty during the Super Bowl, so hotel rooms on The Strip were selling for pennies. Resorts World specifically saw an astonishing 75% dip in revenue during the first quarter.
All of this goes to say that Las Vegas might be in trouble. The city is dying.
Cost goes up, interest goes down. A large part of the recent decline stems from the indefinite increase in price. Everything, everywhere costs more today than it did just five years ago. Duh.
That is even more true in Las Vegas!
Gone are the days of cheap buffets, free drinks, low buy-ins at the card tables and shows that are affordable. That doesn’t even include resort fees, valet, hotel accommodations, etc.
To deny the correlation between the high costs of Las Vegas and the ongoing tourism slump would be silly. People can’t afford to play as many $25 games of Blackjack compared to $5. Nobody wants to pay $17 for a smoothie or $9 for coffee.
But forget reality and actual facts. The left is so desperate to spin Vegas’s decline into an anti-Trump narrative, they’re now blaming him for a slump in tourism years after he left office.
Even The Daily Mail wasted no time cranking out this lazy clickbait take, complete with the claim that international visitors are shunning Vegas “because of Trump.”
One of the reasons Sin City’s businesses are hurting is because international visitors have continued to shun the US – including some upset over the presidency of Donald Trump.
Las Vegas welcomed 3.39 million visitors in March, down almost eight percent from 3.68million in February, according to a report by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.
Hotels were 82.9 percent full the same month, compared with 85.3 percent full in March 2024. Midweek occupancy recorded a decline of 2.5 percent in the same period, despite more than half a million people attending conferences there.
But after getting their anti-Trump TDS headline out of the way, the Daily Mail actually pointed to the real problem, and it has nothing to do with politics. Vegas has priced out the very people who kept it alive, and now the Strip is buried under sky-high costs and a homeless/drug crisis. The Daily Mail piece goes on:
Another reason tourists might be skipping the Strip is its high prices. A visitor recently shared her shock after she was charged $26 for a bottle of Fiji water from the minibar in her room at the Aria Resort & Casino.
And a British magician was left outraged after he was billed $74.31 for two drinks at Sphere in Las Vegas. A 2024 study found that the average income of Las Vegas holidaymakers is now $93,000, with many budget travelers priced out of the gambling capital.
Homelessness in Las Vegas has also exploded, with a conservative estimate of around 8,000 people unhoused across a city of just over half a million. Walk along the busy Las Vegas Boulevard at any time of day and you will see people who are clearly homeless and often under the influence of drugs.
None of this is President Trump’s fault.
The high prices are so out of control that everyone’s competing to find the most outrageous prices in Vegas and posting about it.
That doesn’t sound like a “recipe” for tourism success.
The Telegraph:
In June, a humble bottle of water briefly became a social media sensation, when one stunned traveler revealed that it had been priced at a shocking $26 in the mini-bar at the iconic Bellagio hotel. The story was picked up across the American media.
On the popular discussion website Reddit, meanwhile, forums about Las Vegas have descended into a strange game of Top Trumps, with users competing to see who can find the most excessive examples of Vegas pricing during their visit. “I paid $14 for a bottle of Sprite and $32 for chicken tenders,” posted one user, sounding strangely proud about the whole experience.
The corporations running Las Vegas are working overtime to claw back everything they lost during the so-called “pandemic,” and they’re doing it by sticking it to their customers. The Telegraph piece goes on:
the data shows that prices have jumped disproportionately since the pandemic, with a 50 per cent rise in the average hotel room price since 2019. Fees and charges have also spiked, as casinos seek to make up for lost revenues during the shutdown.
Many experts insist the “Vegas is dying” talk is way overblown. Summer has never been peak season for Sin City; it’s too hot. Also, the city has a history of dipping, rebranding, and roaring back.
That’s all well and good, but if Vegas doesn’t return to its hospitality roots and instead keeps trying to morph into a cold, sterile, American version of Dubai, it’s likely headed for a rude awakening.
Vegas was built on the backs of hardworking Americans looking for an unforgettable weekend, not the overpriced, corporate shell we’re stuck with now.
|
|
Click here: to donate by Credit Card Or here: to donate by PayPal Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794 Thank you very much and God bless you. |
The Mafia made sure their was no small time crime. Offenders were taken to the desert and never seen again—Or to an empty barrel for Lake Mead. Everyone knew this and acted on their best behavior. Crime was controlled.
The good old days in Vegas were awesome.
The new Vegas is an overpriced disaster.
It’s become like a Disney Land where the rides shake you down for money.
They can turn it back into a desert for all I care.
My wife and I went there about ten years ago, and I have never wanted to return. It was dirty, crowded, shopworn, and unrealistically expensive. Overall, I thought it was unjustifiably pretentious.
For example, there was a much-touted exhibition of 19th Century impressionist art the Bellagio. Small as it was, the collection was actually pretty good but chaotically presented, as if they just haphazardly hung the pieces anywhere there was space in the random order they were taken from their packing crates. The curator was giving an absurd lecture to a small crowd, but it was evident that she had, at best, a high school level understanding of art history. Well, this is Vegas, I thought: a place where even great art can be belittled in a pretense of sophistication.
Wait until Havana re-opens
With a big, beautiful Trump casino.
All the big cities were better when the mob ran things
The author is correct.
The boy was sent to Las Vegas to work with a relative or close friend to learn dicipline and the casino business.
Some just ended up banging cocktail waitresses two at a time.
In 1974, Las Vegas was classy, pure class all the way.
Streets were clean, no trash, no crime, no hawkers............
If you go onto the Vegas subreddit, the leftists here will tell you it’s all because of DRUUMMPPFFF and his scaring international tourists off because they of his immigration policies (and Canada hate).
Now it’s just a different mob that runs the big cities, the DNC.
I read this earlier - but already knew about how expensive Vegas has gotten.
It used to be a cheap weekday or weekend getaway for us - We’d stay in a nice but cheap place like the Stardust (has been torn down)- and get coupon books when we checked in - two for one at the buffet for breakfast, lunch and dinner - a couple of free pulls on the house one-armed bandit with a chance to win a car, free drinks, (free cigarettes too for those who smoke), penny and nickel slots, $1.00 blackjack, .99 shrimp cocktails or foot-long hot dogs, free parking as far as the eye could see...Those were Great Days.
Stayed at the run-down Luxor last time I was there a few years ago - way overpriced, buffet was $30, “resort” fee and we had to pay for parking. Blackjack was too expensive to play, slots didn’t pay and I think it starts at $1.00/pull now for one line. Homeless everywhere on the streets, low class street buskers and dancers or aggressive hustlers trying to sell porn or trips to the Grand Canyon.
No Thanks.
Got stationed there in 79 (Nellis AFB). Fun town then, about 200,000, didn’t cost an arm and a leg to go get some entertainment.
Then the “growth” started. The County Commission, Las Vegas, etc went gangbusters stimulating growth. It worked, to some extent. High-growth is not good for residents, lived it, hated it.
Then about 2010-2012 california started seriously moving in, bringing their crowding, crime, and stupidity with them. Saw the politics start to degrade to california levels. That was too bad - I had planned on retiring in Nevada, just had to move to a smaller town.
Held on until 2020, retired, got out of there as fast as I (we) could in spite of the china flu panic. Happiness was Vegas in the rear-view mirror.
Living the good life in Flyover Country.
It’s a wonder they don’t have pay toilets in the hotel rooms!..................
I went to Las Vegas just once though I live in Phoenix and the flight is not long.
Never wanted to go but went for my nieces wedding, which she had there.
Hated it from the minute I saw it from the air. So phony looking. Artificial. Everything new and glitzy is not my like.
Terribly expensive. But here’s something.
We stayed on the 14th floor of a hotel, very empty. Only one other room on our floor was occupied and it was two doors down from us.
The halls were dark and quiet and my mother came with us, occupying the suite on the other side of us, same side of the hall as us.
In the middle of the night I awoke to hear a woman being beaten, badly. Thrown against the wall, screaming and crying. You could practically hear the punches landing.
I was so groggy I heard it in a fog and fell asleep during it all. In the morning I thought I dreamed it.
But in the morning my mother said, ‘did you hear that woman being beaten last night’?! It was then I even remembered hearing it.
We had to go to a prior breakfast before the wedding and then the wedding itself and the plane was scheduled but when I got back I phoned the hotel desk to tell them about it.
The desk clerk got the manager who asked me where I stayed and then gave me a kind of a gruff, ‘you better drop this’ kind of answer, saying nobody else heard anything like that and gave me the impression he was accusing me of being a liar and not to bring this up again.
Yeah. I don’t have any love for Vegas.
But I do feel sorry for Bugsy Siegel. They’re ruining his creation and I would’ve loved to see how HE would’ve run it.
The mafia did run it better after his demise and I know many that went and loved it back in the day. I knew a trucker who said he went for the breakfast’s alone. Steak and eggs and I think he said $1.75 and it was gooood.
They are idiots. Vegas went down decades ago.............
Steak and eggs and I think he said $1.75 and it was gooood.
Reminds me of the Cosby routine about the price of an egg in Las Vegas.
“A dollar thirty-five?!?!?!?!....All I know is, that egg better have an act!”
“He’s okay. He always was....Remo, what do you think?
Look...why take a chance?.....at least, that’s the way I feel about it.”
It was definitely a safe place when the Mob ran things.
They didn’t put up with any BS.............
I just couldn’t understand the Sharon Stone character, why she was so devoted to Lester.
Of course in real life, James Woods is a much better person than DeNiro will ever be.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.