Status Anxiety

16 May 2009

I saw that Vegas is dying when a driver paid me $30 to take me to a lapdancing club

I was staying in the M-Resort, Vegas’s newest hotel-casino which is about ten miles from the Strip. It is what is known as a ‘locals’ hotel’, meaning it’s designed to appeal to locals rather than holidaymakers, which may be a smart move, given the state of the tourism industry. On the other hand, it might not. Unemployment in the state of Nevada is 10.1 per cent, compared to a national average of 8.9 per cent. I spoke to a female reporter who applied for a job as a ‘pool waitress’ at the M-Resort to supplement her income from journalism.

‘I must have applied to half-a-dozen hotels and didn’t get so much as a call back,’ she said. ‘The line to get a job as a pool waitress at the Palms was four hours long. It was like watching a car wreck of people’s hopes and dreams.’ One indication of just how desperate things are is the war that’s broken out between the city’s two biggest strip clubs, Rick’s and Spearmint Rhino. So anxious are they to attract customers, they’re now offering taxi drivers $50 a head for every person they drop off on their doorsteps. As a result, cab drivers trawl the Strip, searching for punters. I managed to extract $30 from one driver in return for delivering me to Spearmint Rhino. When I got there, I discovered the doorman wanted a ‘cover charge’ of $50 so I flagged down another taxi and told the driver to take me back to the Strip. I ended up $15 richer — which isn’t something many people can say after a night in Vegas.

Perhaps the clearest sign that the city is in trouble was the warm reception given to the 25,000 Brits who came to see the Hatton fight. Last time the ‘Hatton Horde’ was in town in 2008, the locals were appalled. For the first time in its history, the MGM Grand shut down all its bars in the hope that these overweight men in their Manchester United shirts would go elsewhere. This time round, the locals were singing a different tune.

‘I made $1,500 that weekend,’ said the driver who took me to Spearmint Rhino. ‘You can say what you like about those British guys, but they love to go to strip clubs. I wish they’d come here every weekend.’

Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.