Las Vegas: collected questions
1. Las Vegas is full of casinos. Each one seems to have most of: a theme, a casino part, a hotel part, and something like a mall.
For instance, here is a mall in a Venetian themed casino. In case it is not clear, it is inside, and all of the walls are decorated to look like buildings, and the ceiling is painted as the sky and there is a real canal with gondoliers in the middle of it. The ‘buildings’ are actual stores—mostly of the normal mall variety, e.g. Victoria’s Secret.
Why are there only malls like this in Las Vegas? If this mall in a normal city, would it be less successful? I presume it would be cheaper, and it would stand out more relative to the surrounding options (within walking distance of this Venice mall there is a Roman mall and a French mall and a New York mall, not to mention dolphins to swim with and a fake volcano to go off and so on). Do the other things outweigh those?
2. Why are there ‘oxygen bars’ on every corner here, whereas approximately none anywhere else I have ever been?
3. Here is part of a Roman themed mall. Is this kind of thing more expensive than usual mall decor, or is it mostly just considered less tasteful if there is no particular excuse for it?
(picture)
4. Why are jello shots so cheap?
5. Why are gambling machines so hard to use? I actually couldn’t be bothered trying this time, even though I must have walked past many hundreds of them, because the other time I went to a casino was so annoying. Shouldn’t gambling machines be catering better to the short time horizon demographic? If they just had a thing I could spin and money might appear, I might have tried it, though I guess only for long enough to experience losing money gambling, in case that is an important human experience or something, so maybe I’m not the right demographic anyway.
6. Is it really profit-maximizing to make a person walk past a gagillion gambling machines before checking in? I think it made me less like to gamble, because by the time I found my room I had a headache, and its not like I was going to stop with all my luggage on the way to the room because I need to gamble so urgently. Do people with long enough time horizons to learn to gamble really not want to put their things in their rooms first?
7. Under what circumstances do people actually get married here? There are a lot of chapels, and they seem pretty nice, so I guess it is a thing. And it is a thing in TV shows. But are they the same thing?
8. Why are the prizes advertised on all the gambling so small? They are often $1000. Isn’t the point of this kind of gambling—even when it is negative in expected money—often that it gives a person a hope of greater things than they could otherwise dream of? Surely this is almost nobody’s only ticket to dreaming about having $1,000.
9. How do we make our own ceiling look like the sky?
10. Why does gambling always go with lots of noise and bright lights? Are they better together for some reason? Why isn’t there a peaceful library themed casino? Did I just not notice it?