When I saw the Atlantic City gaming numbers from 11/2011 and 11/2012 that Craig just wrote about, I thought that the slow death of Atlantic City had just as much to do with gaming profit declines as Hurricane Sandy did. To test my hypothesis I grabbed the September gaming numbers from 2011 and 2012. These should be the last numbers unaffected by Hurricane Sandy.

Here are how the profits shape up:

A few things stand out.

1) These numbers are brutal. Other than the completely redone Golden Nugget (which was previously the Trump Marina) and the completely rebranded Atlantic Club (now a locals casino), every casino lost at least 5% YoY from October 2011 to October 2012.
2) You can explain away the big drop for Bally’s as being due to the closure of most of the Wild Wild West property. You can explain away the big drop for Trump Plaza because it sucks. But what is going on with the Trop? Is it just too far down boardwalk?
3) You can also look at some of 2 month drops between 9/2012 and 11/2012 by comparing our posts. You can see right away that the big loser is Revel, which got it’s profits more than halved. I think that can be explained by it being more of a ‘touristy’ casino, with a relatively weak loyalty program (in my eyes anyway). I can also see why I get so many comps in the off season months in all of these hotels.

We can all agree that the November to November numbers are worse than the October to October numbers. But I don’t think the weakness in the November numbers can be fully explained away by Hurricane Sandy.