Younger crowd rewards Atlantic City’s gamble
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. – LL Cool J was playing the House of Blues. A few blocks away, rapper Jay-Z’s new nightclub was rocking. Fredericka Jones, 42, out on the town for a Friday night with her girlfriends, was determined to hit both, then try her luck at a casino.
She used to make the one-hour trip from her Philadelphia home once every couple of years. Now, she goes several times a year. And she has noticed some changes.
“The crowd is getting younger,” she said. “You don’t see the older crowd as much, the grandparents. Now you see the younger people.”
Rejuvenated by a saucy new casino, trendy clubs and beach bars and a vibrant music scene, Atlantic City is evolving into a nightlife hotspot for people in their 20s, 30s and 40s who once saw it as one big neon-lit retirement home for senior citizens who arrive by the busload to play the slot machines.
Atlantic City began making the shift with the opening of the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa in mid-2003. It stressed sexy fun more than gambling in its advertising, it showcased its racy “Borgata Babes” cocktail waitresses, it offered high-end restaurants, and it booked contemporary stars into its showrooms, instead of the aging crooners and nostalgia acts for which Atlantic City was known.
The moves paid off, turning the Borgata into Atlantic City’s most profitable casino.
The Borgata also bet that blackjack, roulette and craps – which many Atlantic City casinos were ditching in favor of more profitable slot machines – could bring in more business.
Its rivals in Atlantic City’s $4.8 billion-a-year casino business have followed suit, replacing slots with table games aimed at cashing in on both a poker boom and on younger gamblers’ tendencies to favor games with human interaction.
“Tables are hot, there’s no doubt about it,” said casino industry consultant Joe Weinert. “A lot of that is fueled by poker’s popularity and its popularity on TV, which is showing Americans that table games in general are fun.
“Increasingly, we’re becoming a society that has grown up with solitary gaming experiences on their computers, TV sets or personal game consoles. And I think people are going to casinos and discovering the community atmosphere on the gaming tables. They’re finding out that, hey, it’s fun to be around real people.”
In the 2 1/2 years since Borgata’s opening, the Tropicana Casino and Resort has seen a 20 percent increase in table game play among under-50 gamblers.
Resorts Atlantic City – which in the past year has booked rapper Snoop Dogg, opened a trendy Nikki Beach bar and switched its piped-in house music from Motown to contemporary – has experienced a similar shift. Now, 60 percent of the gamblers in the casino’s player database are under 50, compared with 39 percent 18 months ago.
Showboat Casino-Hotel, meanwhile, brought in the House of Blues, a chain of restaurant-nightclubs that built a $65 million addition consisting of a 2,200-seat theater, a restaurant, 50 hotel suites and its own minicasino. Among the acts booked to appear at House of Blues this month: mewithoutyou, Puny Human and Avenged Sevenfold.
“I look at the list of headliners and I don’t even recognize most of these names,” said Jeffrey Vasser, the 45-year-old executive director of the Atlantic City Convention & Visitors Authority.
But he isn’t complaining. Nor are the entrepreneurs opening nightclubs, name-brand restaurants and sexually oriented clubs aimed at the under-50 crowd.
“There’s more to do now,” said Frank Whoy, 23, of Egg Harbor Township, who took in the LL Cool J show at the House of Blues. “More nightlife, more shows.”
But the mix of old and young has also challenged casinos.
“It truly is a delicate balance,” said Audrey Oswell, president of Resorts Atlantic City casino. “You don’t want to do anything that’s going to offend the older customer, which has been so loyal for so long. We’ve found that the young people and the old people can exist side by side, although we did have some people ask us who Snoop Dogg was.”