"And racetrack casinos, as Clyde Barrow, a political economist who studies gambling, explained, draw most customers not from the far and wide but from a 30-minute radius. Rather than drawing new money to the area, it seems, they divert local dollars to gambling. What we hardly need research to tell us is that the world that emerges around casinos is often an intensely depressing place. Across the street from Resorts World is Sell and Pawn Inc., which takes gold, silver, jewelry, electronics and so on from those compelled to find their way to their next slot machine dollar. The shop’s owner, a Russian immigrant, opened up a year after the casino did, having worked in construction and seeing that work dry up after the financial crisis. A friend urged him to open a pawnshop because it was lucrative, but he was not, it seemed, prepared for the psychological toll this new occupation would take, for the fact that moral bankruptcy was now a job requirement. “You have to take advantage of desperate people,” he told me, looking fairly miserable. “I don’t like this business at all.”
Posted on: Sun, 16 Jun 2013 18:14:01 +0000
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