The Massachusetts Gaming Commission hired an organization to study the economic impact in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic. Casino resorts ranked among the industries suffering the most.
UMass Donahue Institute’s Economic & Public Policy Research Group presented its findings to the commission on April 14, according to the State House News Service. Women and casino workers were affected more than others by layoffs. In addition, the casinos had issues keeping their commitments to female and minority-owned vendors.
Casino visitation has yet to reach pre-pandemic levels.
“It was devastating from the onset when the casinos shut down in March of 2020 and it was felt throughout the casino industry, certainly throughout the industry in Massachusetts, and the ripple effect was quite large,” said Mark Vander Linden, the commission’s director of research and responsible gaming. “The good news is that the recovery since that time and once the casinos reopened has been probably better than what could have been anticipated.”
In January 2020, there were 6,520 people working at the three properties in Massachusetts, earning $36 million in monthly wages while the casinos took in $80.25 million in gross gaming revenue for the month. The three shut down in mid-March and did not hit full capacity for more than a year.
Employment plummeted at all three in proportion to the numbers before
the pandemic. Encore went from 4,206 employees to 1,854 workers, MGM Springfield saw 1,909 fall to just 149 workers, while Plainridge Park’s staff count dropped from 416 to just 18 workers, the report said. The workforce remaining on the job “was more white and more male than the pre-pandemic workforce,” the report concluded.
When there’s a crisis, it often hurts more vulnerable populations, said Thomas Peake, a senior research analyst at the UMass Donahue Institute.
“Young people, low-wage workers, women, [and] people of color bore the brunt of the job losses and reductions in hours. A lot of that was because of the sectors that those people are heavily represented in: food and beverage, gaming and recreation, hotel departments. These are areas with high concentrations of workers of color. They were also some of the areas that were most affected by the layoffs,” Peake said.
Many of the laid-off workers have been hired back. The percentage ranks from 48 percent to 63 percent of January 2020 levels.
Casino visitation had not rebounded to pre-pandemic levels as of June 2021, Peake said, but gross gaming revenue had recovered to pre-pandemic levels by last summer. The three gambling centers generated $84.1 million in gross gaming revenue for June 2021 compared to $80.25 million in January 2020.
Gross gaming revenue increased faster than the amount of visitation which could reflect a change in behavior among gamblers.
“If you take gross gaming revenue per visitor, it has shot up pretty dramatically. It could be the people who are going are spending more on gambling because through a good deal of this period there’s less non-gambling things to do at the casino, there could be some problem gambling implications of this that are worth exploring,” Peake said.
On average, post-reopening patrons spent up to two times the amount of money at the casino than before the pandemic, according to the report.
The report mentioned the potential for new revenue and new patrons through legalization of sports betting. But it also said a sportsbook might shift revenue away from the casino side.
“With margins on sports betting being considerably smaller than for traditional casino games, a reallocation of wagers to sports betting will result in less profits to casinos and fewer tax revenues to the state,” the report said.
