A pair of business analyst argue that consumers are now okay with casinos prohibiting smoking on gaming floors, offering another reason to discontinue the practice
The economic rationale for keeping smokers on gaming floors and allowing them to mingle with non-smokers and non-smoking staff who are often exposed to prolonged streams of tobacco vapor continues to crack.
Two casino finance analysts said on Tuesday that there was sufficient evidence to suggest that casinos can reliably shutter smoking on gaming floors and not suffer any associated adverse impact on their operations.
Casino-goers Are Finally OK with Casinos Prohibiting Smoking
The analysts participated in the The Impact of Smoking Regulations on Casino Gaming webinar hosted by Spectrum, Management Science Associates, and Spectrumetrix.
This has been the drumbeat of casinos for a very long time, with staffers and non-smoking advocates criticizing casinos for keeping the exemption in, i.e., that turning down smokers would hurt their bottom lines and lead to job losses.
However, this has been a tenuous argument for a while now, and it is even more difficult to uphold now that Geoff Atkinson, marketing research manager for Management Science Associates, has dug into the data that suggests that customers are okay with casinos passing restrictions on their smoking habits.
His opinion is seconded by Spectrum Gaming Group SVP for financial analysis Matt Roo,b who said that there was an easy solution – keep smokers outdoors while they take a puff, for example. Looking at the economics of cancelling out smoking on gaming floors, the two analysts argue that only 11.6% of the adult population is smoking in 2022, and these numbers are rapidly falling.
The panel also took on some common misconcepts about how canceling out smoking would affect casino and gaming revenues. For example, Illinois has been smoke-free since 2008, and it reported a drop in its slot revenue, but this was the same year that Lehman Brothers went under, triggering a global financial crisis.
The Pandemic Used as Catalyst to Snuff Out Smoking s
Therefore, the old rationale that correlation is not causation is true. Some casinos have used the COVID pandemic as a springboard for enacting changes to their smoking policies. Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods casinos in Connecticut, for example, opted out of smoking after the pandemic, and did not lose economic momentum.
Although there could be some lingering fear about some of the revenue going down, the wider economic data and evidence seems to suggest that there is no real justification to not ban smoking on gaming floors any longer.
