The crackdown on casinos intensifies. New York casinos have been deemed “nonessential” and will remain closed. Patrons who refuse to wear a mask are being cuffed and arrested in Las Vegas. Say what you want about health policy, but this is not going to encourage more gamblers to show up. Still, regional casino stocks are back at or at least relatively near all time highs. How does this make sense? It makes sense in that Wall Street has turned into kitschy tourist trap.
If you’ve ever worn a fanny pack and sunglasses with a “Hello My Name Is” sticker on your shirt while wearing one of those fishing hats and staring at a map upside down, then you probably know what it’s like to be caught in a tourist trap. Everything seems expensive but you really have no idea, because you don’t know the market. You get accosted by the tourist equivalent of those guys that spray your windshield at a red light. They offer you a trinket or ad hoc tour guide services. You usually end up paying them off even though you can’t understand a word they’re saying just so they don’t have an excuse to lynch you in a dark alley you may find yourself in accidentally if you make a wrong turn somewhere.
This is what it’s like at the New York Stock Exchange right now. All the other casinos are closed but this one’s open. There are bunch of tourists with fanny packs and sunglasses on the trading floor, having no idea what they’re doing. They smell like sunscreen and bug spray and they’re busy buying and selling stuff, having absolutely no idea what any of it is or how much any of it is worth. But they’re getting a kick out of it, that’s for sure. Wall Street has now become, thanks in part to continued casino closures, the most dangerous tourist trap for gamblers the world has ever known.
“You don’t need a casino to maintain survival,” says New York Governmor Andrew Cuomo, unless that casino is Wall Street. Well, you do need a casino to maintain survival if you’re working at that casino and you’re living paycheck to paycheck, but whatever. Big Box retailers though, which are open in New York, are somehow “essential to life” according to Cuomo. I guess we should all go down to our bunkers now in the wake of the ongoing retail apocalypse that just got kicked up another notch. JC Penney is bankrupt now. So is Lord & Taylor. Run for the hills people. The Big Box retailers so essential to life on Earth are dying. It’s the second Cambrian extinction. Give me Walmart, or give me death, I think the saying goes.