So if you build a 1,000 room casino for 500 million the cost of a room is $500,000. You need to gross $500 between the room and the gaming drop.

I off the top of my head don’t know how much a room at the Wynn cost to build but I do now that at the Sands it was roughly $1,000,000 a room. The last time I looked Sands was getting about $450 a night from gaming and room revenues.

There is now way someone can put up a luxury casino in Las Vegas for half the cost of the Sands properties. Building a luxury casino in this environment is madness.

I also recently read that the 18 acre site on the Strip where the Elvis themed casino was supposed to be built (across from City Center and just south of Planet Hollywood) is for sale by Spectrum Group Management LLC. The 18 acres there though abuts up to the Polo Towers which makes the property less attractive to most buyers. I doubt Steve Wynn would be interested in this location but who knows.

The Riviera closing brings back memories when the property was more popular and that leads to nostalgia. Nostalgia is a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically
for a period or place with happy personal associations. Win or lose (hopefully not to much money) Las Vegas brings back happy memories for lots and lots of people. Some older casinos (similar to dive bars) have a certain charm to them and some people like this.

Music critic Simon Reynolds wrote a very good book called “Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past” and this paragraph was in his book: Nostalgia is now thoroughly entwined within the consumer-entertainment complex: we feel pangs for the products of yesteryear, the novelties and
distractions that filled up our youth. Mass media and pop culture take up an ever-increasing proportion of our mental lives which is why I Love the 70’s/80’s/etc. shows are so effective: the passage of our time has become indexed to the procession of rapidly obsolescing fads, fashions, celebrity careers et al.