The study published by the St. Louis Federal Reserve about Casino Revenue and the Illinois Smoking Ban is much more comprehensive than I thought. (Here’s a link to the original report: http://bit.ly/njAWr) I think it’s wise that they compared casino revenues from IL to casino revenues from neighboring states (MO, IA and IN). And based on what I read, it looks to me like other states didn’t get hit as hard by the economy. IL seems to have taken the hardest hit. Maybe it’s not just the economy and the smoking ban had more of an impact than originally anticipated.
I do wish that the report had examined 2 more things: the impact of the new Lumiere casino and the impact of Missouri lifting the $500 loss limit. The report seems to indicate that the President Casino (located a few hundred yards away from the Lumiere) suffered huge losses when Lumiere opened. Could Lumiere also have impacted the losses of the 2 IL casinos that are nearby? If so, how much did those losses contribute to the overall loss of IL revenue? Similarly, how much of the 2009 revenue for Missouri casinos was impacted by the lifting of the $500 loss limit? The fact that the reports uses other states’ data helps mitigate these questions, but it would have been nice to see these specific issues called out.
Now that we have this information, what can be done with it? Maybe this report will be a large piece in the fight against the smoking ban in MO. Could it be used to lift the smoking ban in IL, even if only for casinos? What if casinos and anti-smoking lobbies compromised? Remember when restaurants offered smoking and non-smoking sections? Can casinos do something similar? Could states that allow gambling offer an additional “smoking license” to help increase revenue and offset the healthcare costs the state has to pay for healthcare for smokers?
I also wonder if casinos can use their customer data to link smoking to revenues. If casinos ask club-card members whether or not they smoke, that might help them produce some real data on the average gambling frequency and spending habits of smokers versus non-smokers. Maybe they’d find something useful in that data. What if it turned out (for the sake of discussion) that slot players smoke, but table game players don’t? The casino could adjust its layout to provide non-smoking areas for table games, making both groups happier. Or is it better not to know?
September 16, 2009 at 11:24 pm |
[...] in IL lost about 20% of their revenue as soon as the state-wide ban on smoking went into effect. The study did a good job of showing that it’s not just the economy. They showed that casinos just across IL borders (in Iowa, Indiana and Missouri) all suffered [...]
December 11, 2009 at 10:51 am |
[...] In Illinois, one of the first states to pass a smoking ban that eliminated smoking in casinos, the smoking ban taught legislators in other states the financial impact of such a decision. Recent reports from the Illinois Gaming Board and Missouri Gaming Commission have reported, yet again, that revenue in Illinois casinos are down more than revenues in Missouri casinos. This data is in keeping with the results published by Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis in their study of the impact of smoking bans on casino revenues. [...]