If you are—like somebody trying to jumpstart a car on a rainy night but has only managed to connect the black cable—desperately looking for the positive, consider this:
Every minute and every hour and every day that passes gets us closer to the particular day and the particular hour and the particular minute this ends.
When we begin again.
And anew.
The slots will turn on and light up. The dice will dance across the felt. Colleagues and customers will reunite, swapping stories of trials, tribulations and, of course, toilet paper. They will awkwardly—and perhaps unsuccessfully—suppress the urge to shake hands, bump fists, or just throw open their arms and hug the stuffing out of each other.
Yes indeed, the cards will be in the air… and so too will the love.
Yet, even as everything returns to normal, nothing will ever quite be the same. Change, of course, is the background music of any industry, including ours: it’s always there, even if you don’t notice it. Given the pain and disruption we’re enduing individually and collectively, you can bet those notes are only going to play louder and faster.
But what exactly will change? Hindsight may be 20-20, but foresight has cataracts and a scratched retina. Nobody knows. And anyone that says he does, well he (or she) is just trying to sell you something.
Much of your success as an executive is anticipating the future. Everyone knows where the puck is, as Wayne Gretzky pointed out back in the day. The great players, he said, know where the puck is going. That’s where they skate to.
So, where is the puck—or the pucks, as this is multi-faceted—going?
Because you damn well know the status quo is getting ready for a beatdown. The line of demarcation couldn’t be clearer: there’s BC (before COVID) and what comes next. So, as you’re self-isolating, Zooming, and taking a break from binge-watching Netflix, sit down, open your mind and start contemplating life in a post-pandemic world.
Come on, it will be fun.
List five ways the gaming industry will change. Let your mind go wild, with your tangents begetting other tangents and so forth and so on. Todd Haushalter does this. At the beginning of every year, the chief product officer of Evolution Gaming sends out a missive to his friends and family, outlining his predictions for the next 12 months, covering everything from business to sports to business to politics to business.
Oh, and business.
Of course, you don’t have to follow Todd’s lead and distribute them to other people. And it goes without saying that you would be crazy, insane, loco to do in a public forum, where someone could go back years and years from now and goof on you for being so dumb, so wrong, so, uh, non-Nostradamusy.
You know, something idiotic and foolish like this:
- Casinos will start disinfecting, and perhaps even washing, casino chips. Some already do this, albeit intermittently and sporadically. It’s terribly disruptive—not to mention dangerous—to physically remove chips from the table and wash them off the floor. Some smart company will design a way to take care of this, just like the salad bar at Hugo’s Cellar in Downtown Las Vegas, right there at the table.
- Casinos will use surveillance cameras to determine the body temperatures of guests. Of course, they will have to make allowances for poker players that lose to a one-outer on the river.
- Some dealers will wear surgical masks on the job. By the way, for the general public, these will become something of a fashion statement as all the swanky brands figure out they can make a buck by slapping their logos on them. And if LV, Gucci, et al. have their way, people will literally be putting their money where their mouth is.
- Slot machines will practice social distancing. They will be spread out more, as well as positioned in circular pods to keep players out of each other’s sneeze patterns.
- Buffets will start going the way of the Keno lounge, the smoking table, the boxman and the $2.95 steak dinner. As in extinct. As in Bird, comma, Dodo. And the ones that survive will adapt to this new-world order. Forget about tongs or sneeze guards; you’ll have to slip into Buzz Aldrin’s old spacesuit before they let you snag some of those peel-and-eat shrimp from the pile.
