Casino Holiday Shopping

This was  the photo taken at the recent Great Gift Wrap-Up at Caesars Palace.  A photo freebie is one of the perks they do every year during this event and we like this.  We  can look back at all these photos and see how we are aging!  This year we have titled the picture “The Year of the Canes.”

For a long time we never counted holiday shopping benefits when we figured in advance the EV of a play we were considering.  Because  these shopping benefits were “things,” we considered them comps and we counted comps as “gravy.”  A good play for us had to be well over a 100% EV when you added just the basic game return and the cash or cash equivalent benefits.  We loved the comps, of course, but we considered them just the vehicle to a more luxurious life style than we could have normally afforded.

It was fun, for awhile, spending time in a big ballroom full of all sorts of merchandise and deciding what we could buy for ourselves or for our relatives with our shopping points.  But after a few years, it started becoming a chore.  We were in our downsizing years, not our accumulating ones.  We couldn’t find gifts for others that we thought they really needed or would even be what they really wanted.

So we were very happy when a few years ago Caesars, and some other casinos, like MGM, started giving the option of using your holiday gift points for free play instead of “things.”  We found that, in general, we could take the money that we ended up with after playing through the free play and go out and buy any item we wanted.  We could look for bargain prices, much lower than the high full retail prices of the ballroom selections.

Others have their good reasons for wanting to shop in the casino’s ballroom “store,” and I don’t fault them for that.  But for us, holiday shopping benefits have become a welcome addition to the EV of our video poker play, something we are grateful for in this time of decreasing good opportunities.