Ask the Slot Expert: Will cash disappear from the slot floor too?

No one would have believed in the last years of the twentieth century that the days of coins and tokens being the literal and figurative coin of the realm on the slot floor were numbered. Penny slots and machines with minimum bets that don't correspond to a minted coin required that machines break free from coin denominations. Paper currency and tickets are the new coin of the realm. With the exception of a few machines in a few casinos in Las Vegas and around the country, players can play without getting their hands dirty.

Today the question is whether even currency and tickets will be phased out in favor of cashless gaming.

I rarely use cash today. The apps from Starbucks, Dunkin, Einstein Brothers, etc., have payment systems built in so I don't need cash or a credit card there. Even when I charge purchases in person, I rarely use the physical credit card. I use Samsung Pay instead.

I can remember paying with cash only two times in as many years. One was to pay the recycling fee on some fluorescent tubes. The other was to buy a sheet of 99-cent poster board from Michael's. I had exact change all ready to go when the cashier asked me if I was over 55. I am, so I qualified for a 10% discount. So much for exact change.

The main reason I carry cash now is for tipping and I'm even using cash for tips less frequently as many apps now include the ability to tip.

Two recent articles in the local Las Vegas newspapers addressed the current state and future of cashless gaming in Las Vegas: Gaming industry lags in shift to cashless payments (Review-Journal) and Las Vegas casinos, late to the cashless game, appear ready to capitalize with young players (Las Vegas Sun).

Both headlines are unfair to casinos. I don't think Starbucks had to deal with a regulatory body that was concerned about whether it was making it too easy to spend money on its products when it introduced mobile payments over a decade ago.

I don't think Las Vegas would be this far along with cashless gaming were it not for the pandemic. In 2020, the best tool we had was to not get infected. Retailers looked for ways to reduce contact points to protect employees and customers.

I think the Nevada Gaming Control Board moved slowly on cashless gaming because it had to evaluate whether the reward of convenience to the players (and the casinos) outweighed the risks of making it easier for players to lose more than they can afford.

With the pandemic, that calculus shifted in favor of convenience and safety.

Despite the headlines, both articles acknowledge that being heavily regulated necessitated slow adoption of cashless technologies in the casino. That and the fact that casinos may have thousands of machines that have to have the cashless gaming hardware and software installed on them.

The Review-Journal article notes that cashless is more prevalent off the strip than on it. That's not surprising. You have to fund your account some way. Foreign visitors probably don't have a US dollar bank account and credit card and foreign exchange fees can be expensive. Just as buffets have greater importance on the strip than in a locals casino, cashless gaming has greater importance in the locals market where the patrons are, well, local.

The Las Vegas Sun article wonders whether the "use of greenback bills at machines and table games will be just as rare [as the use of coins] years down the line."

That depends on how many years down the line. In the near future (10 years?), not a chance. Bill acceptors and tickets aren't going anywhere. Some people don't have smartphones. Some people don't trust electronic payments. And sometimes casinos don't install the cashless subsystem on machines that are placed on a trial or participation basis.

The death of coins, however, has come about, as indeed many had foreseen. Already when we got our hands filthy scooping coins out of the coin tray at the end of the last century, coins were irrevocably doomed.

It was inevitable.

(Okay, I admit that the literary allusion worked better in the beginning of this section than in the end.)

We just changed our clocks back to Standard Time. The newspapers I read ran the obligatory articles explaining why we started switching our clocks, why we continue to switch our clocks, and why some are lobbying to "stop the insanity" and pick a time lane.

There are pros and cons with sticking with Daylight Saving Time or Standard Time year round.

I'm surprised that no one has suggested the obvious compromise -- split the difference. When spring ahead next spring, move the clocks ahead by 30 minutes and leave them there. Sort of like Standard Daylight Time.

There's no rule that says a time zone's UTC offset has to be in whole hours. If you look at a table of UTC offsets, there are many areas that differ by some number of hours and 15, 30 or 45 minutes.

What do you think? Should we adopt Standard Daylight Time and stop changing our clocks twice a year?

Click here for the latest Covid data.