When businesses collapse and empires fall, there’s the troublesome issue of who ends up suffering the most.
Not the bankers or stockholders or organized crime or the state government which has milked the fuck out of what used to be a cash cow to the point of exhaustion and collapse. They do fine. They’ll survive.
Rather, it’s the thousands of innocent people who end up paying the ultimate price of such unbridled greed and institutionalized stupidity.
Indeed, it’s always the working class as victims. Good ordinary people like dealers, bartenders, waiters, bellmen, valet parkers, and the host of service industry people — struggling to make ends meet within a dwindling market, many of them stuck with upside-down mortgages and unsellable houses in a downtrodden weekend travel destination that once enjoyed it’s best days 30 years ago — they suffer. All these nice people who followed the rules all those years who end up getting fucked while flakes like Donald Trump, one of those who are most responsible for driving this city into the ground, continues to preen his public image like some kind of pathetic financial version of the Kardashians.
The final former Trump property (Taj Mahal) is about to be boarded up and probably imploded at some point, one of the few joyously redeeming aftershocks of what’s been a citywide financial decline of staggering proportions. At least the good people of Atlantic City won’t have to gaze out their windows each day and see those five horrible bold letters on the eastern horizon on bold orange. T-R-U-M-P is about as valuable a name right now as Braniff Airlines and Blockbuster Video. He’s to casinos what Chernobyl is to nuclear energy.
The problem with kicking Atlantic City while it’s down and out is — the cruelty of overstating the obvious.
It gives me no joy nor brings me any pleasure to remind everyone what a monumental clusterfuck of an awful casino market this is, where just about every visitor here gets fucked in the ass — from $390 rooms on Saturday nights over a holiday weekend to an appalling lack of attractions other than padlocked slot machines that don’t pay worth a damn, and crowded restaurants (on weekends) that markup the going rate on classic dinners 1.5x the going rate in comparable high-dollar markets like New York and Philadelphia.
But nothing makes me want to rant in a blog like a wild man worse than simply being taken advantage of, and screwed by casinos who don’t understand a thing about entertainment or really trying to achieve customer satisfaction.
Consider what happened to me earlier this evening.
I went to pick up my rental car on a moderately busy Sunday night. I handed the valet booth my ticket. Mind you, in Las Vegas — or just about any major casino where management realizes the primary incentive is to lure customers inside the casino at any cost — things like valet parking are free. FREE! Or, maybe some places charge a few bucks that very most (I’ve paid $5 in some places). No big deal. I’m going to tip the valet anyway. Plus, whatever I have in my pocket I am likely to play and spend in bars and restaurants.
Want to know the next words I heard out of the mouth of the valet attendant?
“That will be $15.”
FIFTEEN FUCKING DOLLARS! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
Fifteen dollars….to park my car for a couple of hours. Plus the tip. On a 28-degree night in January with freezing rain. At a shitty half-empty casino where a tap beer costs $9.
This is Atlantic City in two minutes. Screw people. Milk them. Take their money.
The only thing missing was a swift kick in the ass from the valet parking attendant, being shot the finger perhaps, along with a sarcastic comment about being a sucker for even bothering to come here in the first place when far newer and nicer places with gambling now shine in all the major surrounding markets. It seriously begs the question — why would anybody come here anymore?
Trouble is, more and more — aren’t coming anymore. They won’t. Too many $15 valet charges.
Is this what Atlantic City has come to? Ripping off would-be gamblers $15 to park a rental car for a couple of hours? This is on top of already inflated hotel room rates and ridiculous restaurant prices?
This, my friends, is why Atlantic City is decaying, and probably deserves to die. But unfortunately, those deceased won’t end up being the casino executives with golden parachutes or naive ownership — those who institute obscene management policies that are supposedly designed to squeeze every nickel from visitors, but which backfire by keeping people away vowing never to come back again.
In Atlantic City, the dead bodies actually belong to the workers — who bear the ultimate price of their bosses’ stupidity.
That’s the ultimate tragedy of this very sad and depressing place.