Whipped Cream Difficulties

I don’t know why, but I find this NYT story sort of mordantly amusing.

Basically, greyhound racing tracks in places like Iowa and Florida saw business declining. So they wanted to add things like slot machines and poker tables, in addition to greyhound races. The states said, “Sure! But the money from slots and poker has to go to subsidizing greyhound racing!”

Well, now greyhound racing is all but dead, and the track owners want to shut down the races while keeping their slots and poker. What makes this kind of amusing is that the track owners are aligning themselves with animal rights groups who think greyhound racing is cruel, and the greyhound racers resent being used as a tool for the expansion of unrelated forms of gambling.

David Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said that the decline in interest in dog racing appeared to be more intense than what had happened with horse racing. “All live racing is declining in popularity,” he said. “It’s just not as impulse-oriented, as convenience-oriented as most gambling is today.”

How bad have things gotten?

 Built for 6,500 visitors — the crowds were so big on opening day that many were turned away — only about 70 regulars showed up at Bluffs Run one day last week. Most knew one another by name. They placed a total of $11,125 in bets on live races, a fraction of the $3,090,179 wagered that day at the casino downstairs.

That’s an average of $159 (roughly) per person. And I do wonder what day of the week that was; it seems odd that the NYT wouldn’t mention if it was a weekend or weekday, or how many races Bluffs Run has daily.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 9th, 2012 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Clippings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.