Mohegan Sun Layoffs

+ The sun has set

The struggling economy without a doubt is affecting the gambling industries. Clear evidence of this is Mohegan Sun in Connecticut who has announced that they will be laying off 475 workers by the end of the month. What makes this all the more interesting is that the company has never laid off a sizable group of people in its 15 year history! So much for my resume that I sent to Mohegan Sun a couple of months ago.


It makes sense that people are more hesitant to throw their money into the slot machines these days, and being that the slot machines are the biggest money maker for casinos, the economy is really affecting business. Slot machines are a gold mine because they need hardly any upkeep, you can pack hundreds of them into a relatively small space, and they don't require a person to play with you.





This phenomenon is kind of similar to online poker because back in the good ole days your everyday Joe American had no problem tossing around a couple hundred dollars onto the tables because he had his job to fall back upon for more scratch. Now that many Joe's don't have jobs, only savvy poker players remain at stakes as low as 0.10/0.20! What you have now is 18 year old Euros with slick backed hair and fancy video game goggles multi-tabling. No thank you!


I have to give the tribal executives at Mohegan Sun some credit on this issue. Despite advances in gambling technology, which has made many of the supervisory jobs redundant, up until now Mohegan Sun has not cut back, despite the economy severely hurting business. Juxtapose this to their competitors at Foxwoods who have laid off thousands of workers since the Fall of 2008.


The casino's chief executive Mitchell Etess said, ?This is the last thing we wanted to do, we just have no choice.? Revenues are down 10 percent since the end of 2007, and it is reported that profits have fallen even more sharply. The company is offering laid off employees two weeks of pay for every year that they have worked. I never thought I would feel bad for a casino, but in this case I do feel for the people at Mohegan Sun.