You will vote this Wednesday on HB-593, which would grant a monopoly on slot machines and high-stakes table games to 4 third-string casino operators.

Please ask yourself before you vote ... is hooking our wagon to a saturated, declining industry the best the legislature can do build a stronger economic future for New Hampshire? 

Busted: Can the Model for Casino Gambling Be Fixed?

New York Times Magazine      March 14, 2012

[T]he annual Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas last October [offered] a sort of crash course in the state of the industry. "We have the power to control luck," Michael Meczka, a veteran casino marketing consultant from Los Angeles, said at another session. But much of the rest of his presentation was about the uncertainty gripping the business, what casinos cannot control. His remarks, in fact, were a bit grim - they reminded me of the despair you hear in the newspaper business over the advanced age of the core customers and the fear that younger people do not like the product enough to replace them.

The big buzzword in the business right now is "cannibalization." It refers, in this context, to casinos' gobbling up one anothers' customers, which for some of them may be the only route to survival. Fahrenkopf, [the American Gaming Association] president, said he was not worried. "What about Starbucks?" he said as I sat in his Washington office. "A block east of here, a block west, a block north is a Starbucks. How much is too much? The market will decide."

Farhrenkopf acknowledged that when the market does decide, it can have adverse consequences - in Atlantic City, for example, where casino revenue is down 37 percent since 2006 and the city's future as a gambling mecca is very much in doubt. Rooms at hotel casinos have been going for as little as $19 a night. At least four casinos have been in bankruptcy, and people are no longer crowding onto buses to head south down the Atlantic City Expressway. "The Pennsylvania casinos are killing Atlantic City," he said. "That's where the Philadelphia market used to go, but now they can stay home."

It's that specter - once-loyal players who disappear - that Foxwoods must worry about. At the Las Vegas conference, Meczka said that when people in the industry tell him they want new customers, his response is: "There aren't any new customers out there. Gaming is an aged community. . . . Anyone who has ever wanted to try a casino has tried a casino." In other words, the market is not expanding - only the venues meant to cater to a finite number of gamblers.

Demand Better Economic Thinking. Vote NO on HB-593.