A pretty controversial rumor has become reality and provoked a lot of debates and discussions recently. The matter is, that Missouri Country is currently attempting to apply restrictive measures to smoking in state casinos. Anyway, the process of discussion has already started and is currently moving through County Council where the fate of smoking gamblers will be decided.
Let’s take a little break and go back in 2011 when there was the first attempt to restrict smoking in gambling facilities. Back in the days the proposal was rejected as it didn’t have any economic reasons and justifications so the casino owners were quite afraid of the fact that such a ban would cause critical damage to the infrastructure and severely reduce the income. That was the actual reason why smoking remained as an allowed activity throughout all these years.
However, researches of the scientists and social situation has rapidly changed, especially after recent pandemic measures and threats, so a lot of people nowadays tend to think that smoking, vaping and other “toxic inhalation” activities should be restricted in public zones. And it is obvious, that casinos have huge traffic, no strict social distance rules and therefore – there is always a danger to get some disease just moving around the crowd.
More than that, C3 Gaming has initiated a research to study the effect of smoking ban in different gambling facilities and as a result the company has found out that such restrictive measures are not equal to losses and in most cases are not connected to the business balances and profits. But, in this case we should also pay attention to the selection of casinos in the research and only then answer the question “Can we extrapolate this data?”.
Moreover, many casinos have invented special smoking zones to meet the requirements of smoking ban measures, so only additional expenses may prevent Missouri gambling facilities from doing the same.
Anyway, it will definitely take some time for the Missouri officials to make final decision and only after that we will know more about actual positive or negative economic effects in gambling facilities.
