Vegas Random Thoughts

I was in Las Vegas last week for work and made some observations. I’ve finally washed myself enough (honestly I thought about lighting myself on fire) times to get over the experience enough to report on it.

Much of the entrances to casinos on the Las Vegas strip are large, heavy glass doors and very few are power enabled. Many of these heavy glass doors are push in both directions, resulting in millions of visible fingerprints akin to horrible disgusting snowflakes littering these doors by the billion where people push on the glass to avoid the bacteria ridden handles . Every smudge made by everything touched by each passer-by throughout the day is preserved for the entirety between cleanings like some horrible anthropology experiment. Every single glass door in Vegas looks this way. It’s dreadful.

If you want to discourage yourself from eating, walk around and observe. Seriously. This observation is mean, but it’s true. Some evenings I felt like a snack and I walked around to find something suitable. I knew I shouldn’t and what I found to be effective in dissuading me was to see who else was partaking in what I was considering and look at their relative shape. Which was almost always large. I wasn’t really hungry and was more or less just looking to waste time. Walking around a busy eatery at night you’ll see customers waddling about throughout a quarter-mile radius devouring oversized goodies and smudging glass doors. “Don’t be that guy” is what I told myself and it worked. That’s not cool and I can’t be described as thin, but sometimes the truth hurts.

There is an oxygen bar on the second floor of the New York New York Casino that is right at the door that leads to the path over the street and to Excalibur Casino. This oxygen bar is immediately next to a very pungent Nathan’s hot dog stand. I don’t get it. I have seen this oxygen bar there every time I have visited Vegas over the last three years and it’s always there and it always smells heavily of hot dogs. Not exactly a pleasant companion scent to oxygen inhalation. Who goes there? I’ve never seen anyone.

Almost no one in Las Vegas understands the mechanics of a moving walkway. They do, however, understand that it’s best to occupy as much space as possible on a moving walkway in order to halt the progress of anyone trying to, ahem, walk. It’s just easier to avoid them.

I don’t understand the strange economics of fancy stores in Vegas. There are many fancy malls in Las Vegas the most fancy I think being Crystal’s in the City Center area. All these fancy stores and no one in them at any point that I walked past them. Thousands of tourists in cargo shorts, T-shirts and smudged fingers from giant ice cream cones and other smudges obtained from various doors, and none of them have the inclination to shop at these fancy stores. How do they make money? How do they pay their rent? Is there rent for them? I don’t get it. Can they sell one item once a month and make enough?