The Fight Against the Slot Parlors Around the Corner
LAS VEGAS — Five miles from the flashing lights and scantily clad dancers of the Las Vegas Strip, Dotty’s Gaming and Spirits lounge on Tropicana Avenue hardly resembles a casino. Decorated with red-and-white checkered tablecloths, plastic flowers, knickknacks and old clocks, the place, like most of the other 64 Dotty’s outposts scattered across this metropolis, looks more like your grandmother’s living room — if your grandmother happened to be an avid gambler.
The customers, mostly women over 40, sat hunched over slot machines, cigarette in one hand, the other pushing a button to spin again.
Yet, for all its mom-and-pop charms (the free Hershey’s kisses, the Barry Manilow music), Dotty’s is locked in a political and legal fight for its survival against some of the most powerful foes in the state: the casino industry and its backers in local government.
Casino companies complain that Dotty’s and other slot parlors have skirted regulations for years, masquerading as taverns so they could infiltrate residential neighborhoods, where casinos are largely prohibited. The parlors occupy almost every corner of the Las Vegas basin. In an effort to shut down the Dotty’s business model, county officials imposed a temporary moratorium on gambling licenses at taverns, setting up a showdown between regulators and the popular slot chains.
“We didn’t want mom-and-pop-type casinos popping up everywhere, and there have gotten to be too many of these slot arcades,” said Steve Sisolak, a county commissioner who has led the charge against Dotty’s. “They don’t create any jobs, compared to a traditional tavern or casino. All they’re doing is skimming the cream off of the gaming revenue without offering anything to the community.”
Mr. Sisolak described the proliferation of slot parlors as a scourge that was killing jobs, driving bars and other businesses to close, robbing Nevada of tax dollars and overrunning residential areas with slot machines. Although the parlors serve food and drinks, few patrons are there for the corn dogs.
“We are redefining what a bar is,” said Mike Eide, the chief operating officer for Dotty’s in Nevada.
“We designed a bar for older women, which was a clientele nobody wanted. It’s probably not a place I would go, but I’m not going to dictate what kind of bar they go to.”
Mr. Eide said that the company was beloved by Las Vegas residents, and that it was only “the big local casinos that complain.”
One regular customer, Jennifer Santos, 39, said she did not worry about being followed to her car at Dotty’s the way she did when she hit a jackpot at a casino.
“You don’t get bothered by drunken men,” Ms. Santos, an administrative assistant, said of Dotty’s. “It’s a friendlier atmosphere. You can get on a first-name basis with the staff. A casino is a lot bigger, and you don’t know anyone.”
In Nevada, most slot parlors are licensed as taverns, which allows them up to 15 slot machines, but only if gambling is “incidental” to the business. State law does not define “incidental,” which has made it very difficult to regulate the gambling there. After tangling with regulators three years ago, a majority of the parlors were forced to start offering food and alcohol.
On a recent weekday, Ms. Santos was among half a dozen customers rooted at their machines in a Jackpot Joanie’s parlor. No one ordered any food or drinks — or spoke much to anyone else — in nearly an hour. Several patrons did help themselves to free Goldfish crackers. The dining tables were abandoned except for a caregiver who sat waiting for her client, an older woman with a walker, to finish playing.
A lone employee kept watch over the entire place. With nobody ordering drinks, he tracked how much each customer was betting, and those who bet enough were offered free drinks.
Such scenes are the heart of the problem, Mr. Sisolak said. With only one employee on site at a time, he said, the slot parlors could operate at a fraction of the cost of a traditional tavern, enabling them to offer lower prices and better odds, making it harder for traditional bars to compete.
“A regular tavern has three bartenders, cooks, busboys,” he said. “These places have none of that.”
Mr. Eide did not dispute that most of Dotty’s revenue came from gambling. But he said the same was true of most area taverns, many of which were buoyed by their slot machines through the recession.
If taverns could make no more than 49 percent of their revenue from gambling — the limit in Oregon, for example — it would put “90-something percent of taverns in the state out of business,” he said.
Las Vegas’s residential areas were already flush with slot machines before Dotty’s arrived. Duck into a grocery store, a 7-Eleven or a sports bar, and you are likely to find local residents hunkered over video slots.
But the explosion of slot parlors has subtly reshaped neighborhoods here. Bars, restaurants and laundries closed during the recession, and many were replaced by slot parlors, which significantly raised the number of slot machines within walking distance. Since 2010, slot parlors here have more than doubled, according to county officials.
Bars with slot machines and video lotteries have changed neighborhoods around the country as well.
Dotty’s, for instance, has encountered similar, if unexpected, resistance from Portland, Ore., to Bloomington, Ill.
On Hayden Island in the Columbia River, a part of Portland close to Vancouver, Wash., residents complained that video lottery bars had driven almost all of the restaurants and stores out of business on one strip now known as “lottery row.” The concentration of gambling has attracted visitors from Washington, they said, but fueled a rise in drug use, prostitution and other crimes.
“The strip mall is no longer a strip mall,” said Jeff Geisler, chairman of the Hayden Island Neighborhood Network, which campaigned to shut down the video lottery bars. “There’s no dry cleaner, no beautician; none of the normal businesses are left. What you have is a minicasino, and it’s a blight on the neighborhood.”
Last year, legislators in Oregon considered a bill that would have imposed tighter restrictions on bars offering video lotteries.
Here in Las Vegas, some patrons of Dotty’s said the convenience had led them to play more frequently. On a recent Monday, Greg Loomis worked a series of odd jobs, walking dogs and gardening for a friend, so he would have cash to play the slots that night with his partner, Debi Eakin, who is unemployed. As they pulled up to a Dotty’s, she asked if he had any money.
“I make $25 a day, plus all the food I can eat,” Mr. Loomis, 61, said. “Sometimes I save it up, sometimes I come in and play it. Stick it in a machine and hope you hit something.”
Within a few minutes, they had exhausted their funds for the night. “Most of it I give to her,” he said. “It’s never enough.”
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