Disinfected dice: Las Vegas casinos getting ready to roll
LAS VEGAS — Free parking, but no valet service. Bartenders, blackjack dealers and waiters wearing masks. Hand sanitizer everywhere.
Yes, dice will roll, cards will be dealt and slot machines will beckon. But poker rooms? Closed.
Tourists returning to Las Vegas will see changes since gambling stopped in mid-March for the first time ever to stem the spread of the coronavirus.
The stakes could not be higher, said Robert Lang, executive director of the Brookings Mountain West think tank at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
“Las Vegas can never be known as the place where people go and get sick,” he said.
Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak has set a tentative June 4 date for reopening casinos. The Democratic governor said in a statement Friday that Nevada has continued to see decreasing cases of the coronavirus and hospitalizations of COVID-19 when some restrictions began to be eased nearly two weeks ago.
Sisolak’s office said he plans to hold a news conference on Tuesday to offer more details about the next phase of reopening, assuming those positive trends continue through the Memorial Day weekend. Nevada’s gambling regulators also plan to meet Tuesday and will consider reopening plans submitted from casinos, which need to be approved at least seven days before reopening.
“We all know what we’ve gone through for the last 10 weeks. No one’s having fun,” said Bill Hornbuckle, acting chief executive and president of casino giant MGM Resorts International. “The simple idea that I could get out, come to a resort, lay at a pool, enjoy a nice dinner, sit at a blackjack table. There’s something to be said for all of that.”
Many properties have aimed for an early June restart in the gambling mecca closed almost overnight in the middle of a hot streak — three consecutive $1 billion months in statewide casino winnings. The city had been drawing more than 40 million annual visitors.
Once given the green light, the marquees and the managers will welcome people back to this 24/7 town built for crowds, excitement and excess. But not every resort amenity will be open. Nightclubs, dayclubs, buffets and large venues will remain closed. Cirque du Soleil shows will stay dark, at least for now.
Signs everywhere will remind guests of new rules: Wash your hands; keep distance from others; limit your elevator ride to your sanitized room to just four people.
“You’re going to see a lot of social distancing,” said Sean McBurney, general manager at Caesars Palace. “If there’s crowding, it’s every employee’s responsibility to ensure there’s social distancing.”
Dice will be disinfected between shooters, chips cleaned periodically and card decks changed frequently. At some resorts guests will be encouraged to use cellphones for touchless check in, as room keys, and to read restaurant menus.
Wynn Resorts properties and The Venetian, owned by Las Vegas Sands, plan to use thermal imaging cameras at every entrance to intercept people with fevers. Smaller operators in Las Vegas and Reno will offer hand-sanitizer.
“A gondola pilot wearing a face mask will be on board to steer the vessel,” a Venetian protocol says. “Gondoliers stationed along the canal will serenade passengers from an appropriate distance.”
New state Gaming Control Board regulations require surfaces to be disinfected according to federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines and “increased attention” to high-touch hotel items like television remote controls and light switches.
Guests will get free masks at large resorts, but won’t be forced to use them. For blackjack dealers, bellhops, reservation clerks, security guards, housekeepers and waiters, masks are mandatory.
“That’s the most visual thing. Every employee will be required to wear a mask,” McBurney said.
His footsteps echoed walking with a reporter past marble statues in the lobby toward a gilded casino vacant for the first time since it opened in 1966. A slot machine cried “Wheel of Fortune!” in the void. Seats on both sides of the game had been removed.
“Visually, you’ll still see a lot of color and activity, but you won’t be able to play every machine,” McBurney said.
At the neighboring Bellagio, Hornbuckle showed new hand-washing stations installed where banks of slot machines were removed. His company is losing almost $10 million a day during the shutdown, he said.
Other rules: four players only at roulette, six at craps. Plastic partitions will separate dealers from players and players from each other at the Bellagio, three at each table.
MGM Resorts plans to open just two of its 10 Strip properties at first: Bellagio and New York-New York.
Hornbuckle promised Bellagio’s iconic dancing fountains will restart as soon as the governor sets a date. Still, just 1,200 of the hotel’s 4,000 rooms will be rented and casinos will be limited to 50% of capacity.
“You’re going to see less people, by control and by design,” he said.
Caesars Entertainment plans to open Caesars Palace and the Flamingo Las Vegas at first, followed later by Harrah’s Las Vegas and the casino floor at the LINQ hotel-casino.
Lang called it unlikely that big crowds will return quickly, and said resort operators with deep pockets “will probably allow a bargain moment” until business improves. “First will be residents of Las Vegas. Then people getting here by car from California. Then domestic air flights. Then international,” the researcher predicted.
McBurney said that with nearly 4,000 rooms at Caesars Palace, he expected just one of six towers will be occupied. “Once people know there’s an opening date ... demand will increase,” he said. “How much? I can’t speculate.”
OAKLAND, Calif. — For a preview of the future of office work, watch how the biggest tech companies are preparing for a post-pandemic world.
Silicon Valley and Seattle giants — Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter — were the first to send their employees home as the virus spread to the U.S. Now they’re among the last to return them to the office. Some of their employees might never go back.
The companies are studying what their highly-paid, highly-valued employees want, using their own technology to make remote work easier and looking to hire new workers outside of big city hubs. It’s a potentially huge turnaround after years in which companies like Amazon and Google chased scarce tech talent by opening or expanding offices in hip urban locations such as San Francisco and New York.
Such a shift might also amount to a repudiation of the notion that creative work demands corporate campuses reminiscent of college, with free food, ping pong tables and open office plans designed to encourage unplanned interactions.
The result could re-imagine not just Silicon Valley but other cities as the companies expand hiring in places like Atlanta, Dallas and Denver, where Facebook plans to open new “hubs” for its new, mostly remote hires.
Change won’t happen quickly, though. “We want to make sure we move forward in a measured way,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during an employee town hall Thursday that was broadcast live on his Facebook page.
Facebook, which has nearly 45,000 employees, is looking five to 10 years down the line as it plans for more remote work, even when COVID-19 is no longer a threat that requires most of its employees to work from home. Since the coronavirus has upended work and office life, even companies with fewer resources and slower-moving cultures are likely to follow.
“Many companies are learning that their workers are just as or even more productive working from home,” said Andy Challenger, senior vice president of staffing firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Zuckerberg said a Facebook employee survey found that about 20% of workers were “extremely or very interested” in moving to full-time remote work after virus-related restrictions are lifted. Another 20% were “somewhat” interested and the largest group wanted flexibility, with some remote and some in-office work. Eventually, Zuckerberg said, as many as half of Facebook’s workers could be working remotely. But he cautioned that this is years, perhaps even a decade, away.
Twitter went even further, announcing last week that it will allow some employees to work from home on a permanent basis, a plan CEO Jack Dorsey hatched before the coronavirus. His other company, Square, which like Twitter is based in San Francisco, is doing the same. Some new U.S.-based job listings for Twitter give the option for hires to work in cities like San Francisco, New York and Washington D.C. but also remotely full time anywhere in the country.
It’s too early to know whether remote work options will mean an exodus of highly-paid tech workers from San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where they’ve contributed to skyrocketing rents and housing prices. But Facebook’s employee survey suggests that at least some of its employees would leave the San Francisco Bay Area if given the option.
For companies that have built their empires on letting people communicate with far-flung friends and colleagues, moving toward remote work is not too hard of a sell. But there are many challenges. Collaboration, spontaneity, face-to-face interactions that aren’t on a scheduled call — all look different when people are working alone from their homes.
There are also some jobs — in Facebook’s case, the toughest content reviewing that deals with suicides, child abuse and other traumatizing material; sales; building, upgrading and maintaining data centers; lawyers who have to be in court and so on — that can’t be done remotely.
Newer employees, especially recent college grads or those with little experience and lower performers might also fall into this group, Zuckerberg said. At Facebook, the CEO said employees will have to meet certain criteria to be considered for permanent remote work. This includes a level of seniority, strong performance and, naturally, being part of a team that supports remote work.
For now, workers at Facebook, Google, Twitter and elsewhere can work remotely through 2020. At Microsoft, employees can work from home until October. But the company’s work-from-home flexibility has fit with the software giant’s broader effort to capitalize on what CEO Satya Nadella calls a shift to “remote everything.”
“Every organization will increasingly need the ability at a moment’s notice to remote everything from manufacturing to sales, to customer support,” Nadella said this week at the company’s Build developer conference.