Not sure where the conversation originally happened (it was a tangent from one of the gaming topics iirc) but now that I'm just coming back from Vegas I'm gonna have to update my theory as to what the hell happened to it.
The truth is, their business volume is FUCKING FINE. There aren't less people coming in. But walking around the Strip casinos made two things painfully clear:
1. Like I said before, each person coming in has significantly less money to lose than the casinos are counting on. This is truer now that the low-rollers have become, well, bottom-rollers basically. But more importantly:
2. The city itself, operating at maximum capacity, cannot push through enough customers to fund all these fucking new casinos.
There really is a finite number of flights that can arrive and depart from McCarren Airport on any given day, and there is a finite number of taxis that can gridlock up Las Vegas Boulevard. There are fully twice the number of hotel/casinos crowding up the joint than when I left, and all of the new ones are massive billionaire-funded vanity projects. Even when the city itself is full, the casino floors are empty - its customers spread out uncomfortably among the various types of expensive floorspace. It hampers the vampiric moneysucking machine that fuels the city, since all the excitement of being among the crowd is lost (as is the pleasure of ducking out of said crowd into a private room), and more importantly it means that a lot of businesses are hemmorhaging a lot of cash on maintenance for complete junk. And the worst part is, not a goddam one of them have done the only intelligent thing and scaled it the fuck down. The glamour of Vegas seems to be more important than the goddam profitability of Vegas.
This is my issue with the American economy in general - it's not that the corporations have gotten greedy, it's that they've gotten fucking stupid. When the major banks can no longer say "no" to loans they know they're going to lose their asses on, and major hotel owners no longer understand the most basic concept of cost versus return, then the economy is going to do a backflip into the shithole no matter how many smiles and puppydogs the ruling class hands out.