How Much Does The Casino Pay
As of Feb 12, 2021, the average annual pay for a Casino Dealer in the United States is $39,777 a year. Just in case you need a simple salary calculator, that works out to be approximately $19.12 an hour. This is the equivalent of $765/week or $3,315/month. While ZipRecruiter is seeing annual salaries as high as $71,500 and as low as $11,000, the majority of Casino Dealer salaries currently range between $32,000. The range for our most popular Casino positions (listed below) typically falls between $22,979 and $112,725. Keep in mind that salary ranges can vary widely depending on many important factors, including position, education, certifications, additional skills. The Cherokee Nation has more than 6,000 people on the payroll The casino’s not trying to get out of paying. Hourly Rate - Get a free salary comparison based on job title, skills, how much does cherokee casino pay experience and education. Nice doubt, to make you understand everything I have included an article in detail here. Find some time to check it out. Many casinos state their slot game payouts. We know that payout percent can be higher than 90 percent but it can also be lower. The average Cage Cashier - Casino salary in the United States is $33,172 as of January 29, 2021, but the range typically falls between $27,571 and $42,086. Salary ranges can vary widely depending on many important factors, including education, certifications, additional skills, the number of years you have spent in your profession.
If you’re entertaining dreams of owning your own casino one day, you’ll need anywhere from a few thousand dollars to a few billion.
The casino business is so lucrative that every time a new casino opens as “the most expensive casino ever built,” investors pop champagne bottles and raise a toast. It wasn’t always that way. Only a few decades ago, casino operators built on slim budgets.
Steve Wynn gambled big in the late ‘80s when he opened The Mirage in Las Vegas. Wynn and his backers invested an unheard-of $630 million in the new casino. At the time, industry analysts calculated the casino would have to turn an average daily profit of at least $1 million to meet its financial obligations.
In 2019 dollars, that isn’t so bad. If a casino has only 1,000 gaming machines, it can turn a $5 million daily profit just by retaining an average $1000 per machine.
According to a 2015 Las Vegas Sun article, about 40 million people visited Las Vegas on an annual basis at that time. That works out to nearly 110,000 visitors to Las Vegas daily. There are just over 100 casinos in Las Vegas.
In 2017, it was then reported that annual visitors had climbed to more than 42 million.
If each visitor loses only an average of $100 per day, Las Vegas is raking in $11 million in casino earnings every day. The reality is much more startling.
In 2013, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas published a study on the daily revenues of the 23 big casinos on the Strip. To be included in the study, a casino had to produce gaming revenue at least $72 million a year. The average for each of the big 23 turned out to be over $230 million per year.
That’s a far cry since The Mirage opened in 1989, but competition has changed the city’s gaming industry. Here is a deeper look at what it costs to build a casino.
Location, Location, Location
If you want to build a casino for as little as possible, buy cheap land. Where that wicket becomes sticky is in finding the right land. Not only do you need favorable laws allowing gambling and zoning for casinos, but you also need at least a good nearby highway.
Las Vegas is a hub for three Interstate highways and several US highways. The city is also home to McCarran International Airport. About 40 million passengers pass through the airport every year.
Considering AmTrak carries passengers to the city as well, tourists visit the city by car, bus, train, and plane.
If you decide to build your own casino, lacking the transportation channels that Las Vegas boasts means your location will attract fewer annual visitors. This probably explains why few cities dominate the casino industry. The casinos need both good zoning and access to transportation to attract visitors.
Hence, you should expect to pay a lot of money for the land.
Size Counts In Every Way
The Mirage currently boasts about 2,000 slot machine games. While that sounds like a lot, the WinStar World Casino in Thackerville, OK has about six times the floor space as The Mirage. The WinStar opened in 2003, making it 14 years younger than The Mirage.
According to their website in 2019, the WinStar holds about 8400 slot machines. They also have a 55-table poker room, all squeezed into 400,000 feet of floor space. If you want to compete with the WinStar, you’ll need a lot of floor space and thousands of more games.
The casino is owned and operated by the Chickasaw Nation, who had plenty of available land for development. That’s an advantage over the average commercial developer. By owning the land as part of their reservation, they were able to invest more in creating a high-quality resort.
You Need a Hotel and Restaurant
One reason why good casinos cost so much to build is the bigger casinos contain or are paired with big hotels. By providing their visitors with safe, comfortable accommodations, they ensure those visitors spend more time in their gaming areas.
On-site entertainment and dining venues enhance the hotel and casino experience. The farther away from Vegas and Atlantic City one gets in the United States, the less extravagant the casinos tend to become.
Only a handful of states and cities allow commercial casinos to congregate in their jurisdictions. The demand for suitable land limits the competition.
Biloxi, MS is North America’s third big commercial casino hub.
The Beau Rivage may be the best known of the Biloxi casinos. They only offer about 1800 slot games. Owned by MGM Resorts, Beau Rivage promotes its hotel, entertainment, dining, and nightlife venues equally with the casino.
These are not afterthoughts. They are part and parcel major pieces of the whole package.
According to Fixr.com, the average cost of a hotel in the United States is just over $22 million. A hotel comparable to the resorts at WinStar or Beau Rivage will easily set you back in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Factor in the Cost of Games
Assuming the hypothetical new casino brings in a lot of slot machines, how much do they cost?
The website HowMuchIsIt.org rounds up a list of price ranges for popular slot machines. Expect to pay at least several thousand dollars per basic game. The enhanced games may run $30,000 or more for the consoles.
If you can bring enough people in, the games should pay for themselves in only a few months. That’s not so bad.
However, the games will need to be maintained. A new casino must include the cost of hiring qualified staff or for paying authorized service contracts.
Plant Operations Are Expensive
Whether you’re building a roadside casino with 100 machines or planning a massive resort with more than a handful of casino games, the buildings will need electricity, water, heating and air systems, sewage, and maintenance areas.
Assuming a modest 200-room hotel is built on the property, it will have its own plant facility. Ditto for a small restaurant.
This new casino will need tools and equipment no one thinks about when pushing buttons and counting cards. There are lighting systems, sound systems, security systems, communication systems, and staff offices.
Employees will need dressing rooms and lockers, or at least their own break room.
Administration will need at least one office, maybe two if there is a dedicated full-time security team.
The cashiers will need a counting room and vault.
All these facilities must be built out, equipped, and brought online. This is all before you hire your first employee.
Conclusion
If the idea of building a new casino seems crazy, it is. This is an industry for billionaires and rich investment fund managers to play in. It’s not for the faint-hearted or small business person.
It’s true there are hundreds of small casinos that do just fine. With only a few dozen to a few hundred games, they cater to local customers. They don’t need big highways, trains, and airports.
Even so, the cost of setting up a small commercial will run into the millions of dollars. Most communities won’t accept commercial casinos. Most states don’t license them. The Native American tribes may contract with casino management companies but only the big ones.
In short, it costs a lot of money to open a casino. Buying one is out of the question for most people. Donald Trump is believed to have lost about $1 billion in investors’ money by trying to buy his way into Atlantic City.
Short of inheriting a small fortune or casino, this kind of development is one game well beyond the reach of typical investors and small business owners.
With the massive success of tribal mega-resort casinos like Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods Resort, people might get the idea that all Native Americans are rich thanks to tribal gaming. But after sorting through a long laundry list of regulations, administrative salaries, and strict profit distribution rules, not many come out with a windfall of cash.
How Tribal Casinos Were Legalized
In the 1970s the Seminole tribe of Florida opened a high-stakes bingo operation, which quickly caught the attention of Florida authorities. As gambling was illegal in Florida at the time, they tried to shut down the game. After appealing to the Supreme Court, the Seminoles won their right to gamble on their own reservation lands (which are federally-granted territories within states), and that states did not have to right to meddle in reservation affairs.
With a few landmark court decisions involving tribes in Florida and California, the stage was set for Native American gaming. But that doesn’t mean the millions started flowing overnight –setting up tribal casinos involves tribal compacts with the state, casino licensing, and most of all: lots of money.
Barriers to Entry
There are 562 federally-recognized tribes in the U.S., but only 200 operate casinos. Some refuse to participate due to their beliefs, while others simply lack the resources to finance a large casino. The rules of tribal gaming say that casinos must be owned by the tribe, not outsiders. This is to ensure that organized crime elements don’t gain a foothold, but it also follows state laws regarding the operation of casinos on reservations.
Over 150 tribes are seeking federal recognition right now, though many say they are just looking to cash in on the tribal gaming action. The 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) also says that individual Native Americans cannot operate casinos, only tribes can operate casinos. Tribal gaming is not an individual right, but a government action, which involves tribal leaders as well as state and federal officials.
Contrary to popular belief, not all tribal casinos are mega-resorts like Foxwoods Resort, one of the largest casinos in the world. Many tribal ‘casinos’ are merely smoke-filled trailers with a few table games, hardly a money-making machine. The prohibitive cost of building casino resorts keeps the majority of Indian reservations off the casino map.
Casinos are also separated by classes, and Class III casinos have the most stringent hoops to leap through. In addition, reservations located in remote areas far from major cities do not usually develop casino resorts. Tribal casinos can receive support and investment from other tribes (like the wealthy Seminole tribe, which owns the Hard Rock International brand), but investors usually choose reservations near state lines or densely-populated areas for maximum drawing power.
Many Fingers in the Pie
Once a tribe finally has the paperwork and cash to embark on a casino project, the tribal leaders must still get together to determine how the money is distributed. And it is not distributed equally. Just because an individual is a member of a tribe which operates a casino does not mean they receive a free cut of the cake.
Tribal-State compacts are agreements which outline the rules and regulations for operating tribal casinos. Each state has different conditions, licensing fees, and percentages of the profits. While states can’t officially ‘tax’ reservations, they usually just couch their cut in language like ‘licensing fees’ and ‘slots revenues.’ As part of their deal with the State of Connecticut, Foxwoods Resorts pays 25% of its slot revenue to the state. Since the resort is 4.7 million square feet, with 380 gaming tables and 6,200 slot machines, the state does take a sizable bite of the profits.
Also, in the rare cases where individual tribe members each receive a payment from the profits, the federal government takes its own tax out of these payments.
Strict Rules
After the state takes its cut and all expenses are paid, any net profits are subject to strict rules regarding distribution. According to the IGRA, gaming net profits can only be used in the following ways:
1) Fund tribal government operations or programs
2) Provide for the general welfare of their members
3) Promote tribal economic development
4) Donate to charitable organizations
5) Help fund operations of local government agencies
If a particular tribal council wants to hand out individual payments to members of the tribe, they must get approval from the Secretary of the Interior. Of the 200 tribes operating casinos, only 70 tribes give per capita payments from gaming revenue. And of these few tribes, the payments range from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars per year; hardly the cash windfall many people imagine.
Exceptional Cases
Fortunately for some of the poorest members of a tribe, some casinos have decided to ‘provide for the general welfare of their members’ via direct payments. In very few exceptional cases, these payments have even been large enough to be life changing.
According to a long-term study on the Eastern Band of Cherokee in North Carolina, researchers saw a profound change in the lives of tribe members who received regular casino payments. In 1992, Duke University researchers began to study the effects of poverty on the Cherokee families in Cherokee, North Carolina. When the tribal casino came along, promising to disburse payments to their tribe members, Professor Jane Costello saw the opportunity for a “natural experiment” as a result.
Casino Workers Wages
The Eastern Band of Cherokee Native Americans opened a casino in the area, and promised all 15,000 tribal members an equal cut of the profits. The first casino was more of a glorified arcade of slots along a forgotten highway, and the first payments came to a single yearly payment of only $595 for each member of the tribe.
But the casino has grown, and in 2016, every tribal member received around $12,000. The casino also sets aside payments for Cherokee children, to be cashed out when they turn 18. Some young Cherokee adults found over $100,000 waiting for them, enough to fund college education, business interests, or investment in the future.
A Bigger Truth
When Professor Jane Costello of the Duke University Center for Child and Family Policy analyzed the results of years of research, she discovered a bigger truth. By studying the long term effects of poverty on children, she found marked improvement in the mental and emotional well-being of Cherokee children whose families received payments of only $4,000 per year.
Professor Costello applied detailed psychological assessments of adolescent Cherokee children and continued the comparisons through adulthood until age 30, and compared these results to children who had never been poor. Children at the poorest levels were prone to violence at home or school, behavioral disorders, anxiety, depression, and substance addiction.
But the children whose families received regular money from the tribal casinos showed a 40% decrease in behavioral problems as well as fewer drug and alcohol issues. When the research began, Costello did not think that the small amounts of casino money would make a difference in what she saw as “such a pit of poverty.”
After witnessing the major changes in the lives of the Cherokee families who received unconditional cash transfers, Costello found evidence of the effects of a larger political experiment: a universal basic income. “I suddenly thought, ‘Oh my god,’” Costello said.
Pay Now or Pay Later
Professor Costello’s research led to a testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs regarding the importance of investing in children. In addition to a decrease in behavioral problems associated with poverty, the Cherokee children who received tribal casino money had fewer teen pregnancies, were more likely to finish high school, and most went on to secure better jobs.
How Much Do Casinos Make
Since the research and the testimony, the current political environment has shifted dramatically toward conservative policies. While the income of the top 1% of Americans has tripled in the past decade, the income of the average family has flatlined.
While a conservative government balks at handing out any form of payment to the poor, society will end up paying for the results of an impoverished population. The costs of rehabilitation, incarceration, and drug addiction are paid by everyone. In her testimony before the Senate Committee, Professor Costello summed it up:
“When it comes to raising children to be independent citizens, we pay now or we pay later.”