Coronavirus Perspectives: Las Vegas bartender when everything shuts down | Kevin Edwards

About this episode

Recorded in the immediate aftermath of Las Vegas's March 2020 pandemic shutdown, this "Coronavirus Perspectives" conversation is a first-person snapshot of a city built entirely on discretionary spending grinding to a halt overnight. Kevin Edwards, a longtime Las Vegas card dealer who had switched to bartending about a year earlier, describes driving the Strip the day after casinos closed: a still-lit but nearly empty boulevard, marquees promising "we'll see you soon," and a hashtag campaign ("Vegas Stronger") papering over the fact that a twenty-minute news announcement had put an entire workforce out of a job by midnight. He walks through how he'd been persuaded the shutdown was warranted — not by government messaging but by a data-analytics article comparing projected case counts under a March 15 versus March 23 shutdown (160,000 critical cases versus 1.6 million) — a piece of reasoning he found more convincing than anything else he'd seen. The conversation's economic core is blunt: MGM and other major casino operators announced they would keep paying base wages through the closure (initially extended to April 30), but Edwards points out that roughly 75% of service-industry income in Vegas comes from tips, so a wage-continuation promise does little to prevent workers from falling behind on rent, utilities, and — in his own case — child support, with utility companies agreeing not to shut off service for nonpayment but not agreeing to forgive the debt itself. He voices a specific fear, drawn from his read of the 2008 housing crisis, that stimulus money will again flow to banks and corporations rather than directly to displaced workers, and worries aloud about credit card companies eventually cutting off credit lines once they sense borrowers won't be able to repay. Beyond the economics, Edwards reflects on how casino corporate culture has shifted during his roughly 18 years in the industry, from an ethos centered on guest experience and employee enjoyment toward a department-by-department profitability mandate that, in his telling, has stripped much of the "Disneyland for adults" fun out of the business — a shift he contrasts, half-nostalgically, with old-timers' stories of the Mafia-run Vegas of the 1960s-80s, while acknowledging that nostalgia may be doing some of the work in that comparison, much as it does for people who romanticize hand-weeding farm labor from the 1970s. He closes by hoping that whatever new rules emerge from the pandemic will finally address a system in which "money and profit cannot be the number-one thing that drives the actions of the world," while admitting he doubts humanity can actually pull that off.

“There was a surprising amount of traffic, but there was hardly anyone anywhere, and all of the main building lights are shut off. The big marquee boards are still going and they say things like, we can't wait to see you again soon.”

“You're talking about a city that didn't even shut down when they had a mass-casualty shooter shoot at people. The city kept going. Nothing has ever shut down Las Vegas, ever.”

“MGM has said that several of the major casinos have said we're gonna go ahead and keep paying your paychecks... which sounds really nice until you realize that 75% of our income was probably on tips. It doesn't matter what kind of bailout they give us, people in the service industry are losing their homes, period, at the end of this.”

Notable quotes

“MGM has said they're gonna go ahead and keep paying your paychecks... which sounds really nice until you realize that 75% of our income was probably on tips.”

“I even had to contact my ex-wife and go, I hope you understand this means I can't pay child support... I may have a warrant out for my arrest because I can't afford it.”

“There was hardly anyone anywhere... the big marquee boards are still going and they say things like, we can't wait to see you again soon.”

“I've watched those companies transition from caring deeply about their employees... to every department has to be profitable, or your head's gonna roll. They've destroyed the entertainment of it.”