So...even though I'm back from AC for the year, I'm still following news down there, and I've noticed that Ocean and Borgata are undergoing renovations. Now, do they NEED renovations? No. These places are popping. Those two and Hard Rock casino are the three most profitable and high end casinos in AC by far. So why are they renovating? To keep up with the Joneses. These casinos have an interesting clientele. Like, they're all a bunch of rich fricks with impossibly high standards, and even though the casinos are currently in good condition, they still feel the need to keep up with the Joneses and renovate to keep things looking fresh, because the second they become "dated" their wealthy customer base will drop them like a hot potato.
And idk, from my perspective, it tends to piss me off. I look at those places and find them generally unaffordable. I mean, come in, $200+ for a hotel room on a week night? Really? And on weekends its like $600. These guys spend more on one weekend out than I spend a whole year on gaming. It's insane. It's obscene. And obviously, unnecessary renovations are gonna drive up the cost.
You wanna know what this also impacts? COLLEGES. College is insanely expensive. Then when I was leaving they announced that they were renovating the science building. Now, did the science building NEED renovations? No. It didn't. But again, gotta keep up with the Joneses to avoid looking dated (tbf the science building when I was there was a bit dated, but perfectly functional). So they spend millions and millions renovating, and then who pays? The customer. We get stuck with the bill. We pay more for tuition. We're in college debt paying for these peoples' stupid renovations. Same with hotels. They renovate unnecessarily, and then the cost goes up.
With my college, it eventually bit them in the butt. After I left they started acquiring more land and properties to grow, trying to compete with the other college across town, and then COVID hit....and the gravy train stopped. People started realizing college wasn't paying off. They stopped going like they used to, and now, the college is in debt and on the brink of closure. I always wonder how tf do these places do something so stupid? Well, this is how. They spend tons of money, expecting to make it up later, except they don't. And then they're screwed.
But yeah, back to casinos. There are other casinos in AC that appeal more to my tastes. As I said, I like resorts. Relatively affordable by AC standards (still kinda high but at least affordably so), cheap food, close to everything, it's one of the value kings of the AC boardwalk. And that's what I'm all about: value.
But this clientele isnt about value. It's about "the best", to the point that they have impossible to satisfy tastes, they dump tons of money and then they nitpick every little thing. Like "oh the curtains arent right." I mean, really? Youre going on vacation and youre complaining about your hotel room's curtains? Really? Unless theyre really crappy curtains, i dont see the problem.
II swear, some people have too much money. We got this K shaped economy thing going on. Or as andrew yang called it a decade ago, "the war on normal people." Basically, income inequality is leading to two self reinforcing feedback loops in America. You got "the bubble" where everything is fine and the values are the same as they always have been, and then you got the rest of america, where things are going to crap. I'm from the side of america where everything is going to crap. And it's not just jobs. It's income inequality and distribution. This K shaped economy means we get less and less, and that other demographic gets more and more. And for them, they really are in a bubble, everything is fine, they believe in all of those old world values so to speak like hard work, meritocracy, but for the rest of us, we gotta adapt, because this economy has been failing us in a big way. Even if we are employed, the work isnt paying what it used to, and everything is more expensive. In the 2010s, it was jobs, in the 2020s, its affordability. Same core problems, just different ends of the phillips curve.
Companies dont appeal to the middle class any more. The middle class is no longer the middle of the income distribution. The new "middle class" is the "upper middle class", ie, the upper end of the distribution. It's that top 10% of the country that makes up 50% of the spending. And I know people always say the top 0.1% or whatever are the problem, and dont get me wrong, they are, but that petit bourgeoisie class in that top 10-20% of the country is a problem too. They're fundamentally conservative on economics. They make all the money and dont want their taxes to go up to pay for everyone else. They're big spenders. They're the ones staying at Ocean and Borgata and complaining about the curtains being more than a year old.
They're the ones buying GPUs with gaming, and $70 releases. It's gaming too. We used to have affordable GPUs for all price ranges down to sub $100. Nowadays youre spending $260 for a 5 year old card that barely cuts it for AAA games. $500 is what it now costs for a 9060 XT 16 GB and don't get me started on Nvidia prices. I saw today the 5070 is now the most popular card on steam. I mean, wtf? That is like a $900 card right now, how tf are people affording this crap? Why do I always see people praising the fricking 9070 XT, a $800 high end card? Why does a 5090 now cost as much as a car? Again, it's all rich people. Businesses have decided they can make the most money appealing to a shrinking customer base of the most wealthy people, while the rest of us can just get screwed and stop being poor. We're getting priced out of our hobbies. The next gen game consoles are probably gonna cost $700 minimum, likely $1k. Ram is $500 for 32 GB. 8 GB is the bare minimum for VRAM but good luck finding a decent card that isn't one of those twitchy intel cards for under $500 these days. Crap just isn't working for most people. And it's because the top 10-20% have seemingly limitless amounts of money while the rest of us can work to the bone and go into debt trying to barely keep up. It's insane. The middle class dream in this country is dead.
Same with vacations, to go back to casinos and the like. For most of my life, you could spend like $50-60 and get a decent hotel room. Suddenly crap's exploded where now you need $100+ just to NOT sleep with roaches and bedbugs. And then those affluent people will dunk on your $150 hotel room anyway since "oh god why would you ever stay there?" while spending $300+ staying in some luxury place. Again, I think a huge problem with the economy is some people just have WAAAAAY too much money. And our economy is distorting itself around them, at the expense of the rest of us.
Even worse, there's a saying going around lately that seems to deeply resonate with my emerging understanding of the world in the past few years. Our society is a resort for rich people, and the rest of us are just staff.
For the past century, we had Fordism being the defining trait of our economy and its consumerism. Employees should be able to afford the products that they spend all day building. That reciprocity is breaking down with this K shaped economy. In reality, our society is just serving an ever shrinking demographic of increasingly rich people, while the rest of us are struggling to maintain our accustomed living standards, or even beginning to decline in standards.
You see this no more clearly than in a place LIKE atlantic city. Basically the "big casino" of the east coast (Widerquist's original analogy seemed to be based on vegas). You got a wealthy clientele coming in, places struggling to stay open, some making bank, appealing to rich people (the big three casinos make the overwhelming majority of casino profit and appeal primarily to the wealthiest consumers). Theyre renovating like crazy. To the locals, these renovations are probably sold to them as "job creation" projects where they're told the wealth will "trickle down." It never does, the "small casinos" (individual businesses/casinos) all pursue their own profits, which means paying people as little as possible while extracting as much work as possible, they deny responsibility for the larger condition of the city (a ghetto next to an ocean), and things never improve. The habits of this big casino become self reinforcing. Wealth concentrates at the top. The bottom and middle decline. The companies try to extract as much as possible from people, and when they have no more to give, they appeal to a smaller, wealthier clientele. THe rest of society just ends up existing to serve them, working the jobs to keep the system going, while reaping none of the rewards. Historically, we'd argue "hard work" is rewarded. THe more I look at the modern economy, the more I know that that's bullcrap. And it's one of the reasons I myself have abandoned the work ethic.
And dont get me wrong, my anti work indepentarian philosophy tends to reject the idea of people being forced to work, even if the rules are, on paper, "fair." I dont just want reciprocity in a system i didnt agree to, I want freedom from said system. I dont wanna have to labor at all. But at least the reciprocity made it seem fair on paper. Now, we're left with an economy where most people are working themselves to the bone and have little to show for it. Even if they have jobs, they dont pay well enough and then charge rates for goods and services few can afford. It really is a war on normal people. And that's why people have been pissed the past decade or two. Because this decline is becoming increasingly apparent. It was apparent after 2008 when people were forced to take on crappy service jobs that didnt make ends meet. And now it's apparent as the businesses just stop appealing to the middle class at all, instead appealing increasingly to the wealthy with seemingly limitless amounts of money while the rest of us struggle to maintain our previous living standards and get by.
This system needs to change. I've already talked about solutions, and yes, UBI is a solution here. But yeah, I just wanted to rant about stuff.
