Luck has nothing to do with how the nation’s casinos stay clean, sparkly and appealing to the millions of gamblers and tourists that trek through the doors each year. There’s a lot more time and toil involved than what it takes to make a lucky slot-machine crank or have a good hand dealt at the blackjack table. (Well, maybe more toil at least.)

All told, cleaning a casino is a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week job where cleaners shampoo carpets, vacuum felt on blackjack tables, and scrub elegant restrooms trimmed with chrome, for starters. For suppliers, it means keeping a heavy stock of cleaning chemicals and paper products, and maintaining good relationships with casino-supply purchasers in a market thick with competition, whether it’s in Atlantic City, Reno/Lake Tahoe or Las Vegas.

Three of Las Vegas' most elegant casino resorts — the Bellagio, Venetian and Mirage — have 3,000 hotel rooms each. These are by no means quaint hotels — they feature gigantic luxury rooms that require multiple sponge swipes and have more carpet to vacuum than any Best Western hotel room in any U.S. city. MGM Grand is the city’s largest casino with 5,005 rooms and 8,000 employees. This month Steve Wynn expects to break ground on Le Rebe (French for “the dream”), which will cost about $1.8 billion to build, surpassing the record $1.6 billion it cost to construct Bellagio. You can bet that distributors will be kept busy training newly minted cleaning employees and convincing casino operators that their products will do the job best.

But jan/san suppliers specializing in this niche say they wouldn’t give up the toil for any chunk of casino change. After all, this is the playground for high rollers. Distributors in this market report high profits and a high volume of supply orders.

“It’s very aggressive as far as competition from other distributors,” says Nick Spallone, general manager of Lake Tahoe Supply Co. in Carson City, Nev. Offices are also in Sparks and Lake Tahoe, Nev. He reports a 30 percent growth rate every year since 1996. “Everybody wants a piece of that pie because the volume is enormous.”

A City Whose Cleaners Never Sleep
The bulk of cleaning is done during the graveyard shift (roughly 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.). “Today, with 24-hour cleaning, you need to work around the customers who are the lifeblood of the casino. You’re not going to strip and refinish floors at noon on a Friday. If they’re not gambling, the casino is not making money,” says Bob Bank, senior account executive at Sanitary Supply Specialties in Winslow, N.J. His company supplies all 12 casinos in Atlantic City, N.J., all of which have in-house cleaning crews.

Using internal janitorial employees is a departure from 20 years ago when all of the casino resorts in that city hired contract cleaning crews. (In Atlantic City, casinos used to close for a few hours every night, before they mimicked Vegas’ 24-hour-a-day plan.) Today, Atlantic City uses contractors only for difficult jobs like cleaning exterior windows and shampooing rugs. In Las Vegas and northern Nevada, they’re all the norm, unlike five years ago.

What are some of the products that casinos need? Paper products include napkins, doilies, hats for food service workers, and restroom supplies. Bank says the key to making a profit is to focus on specialty items — products that only casinos will be using. These include chandelier cleaners and hard-surface protectors that resist fingerprints for slot machines.

Aside from chandeliers and slot machines, “You’ve got some very ornate things — high-end marble, specialized wood — that require a special amount of care,” says John Hraba, president of Casino Hotel and Resort Consultants LLC, based in Las Vegas. The felt on table games needs frequent vacuuming as well, he adds.

Get It There Fast
Gordon Elliott, president of Reno, Nev.-based Inland Supply Co., Inc., suggests distributors have an “access inventory,” available as soon as possible, that requires only a quick phone call from the casino to enact the order. “You might get a call at 4 p.m. on a Friday for 100 cases of liquid soap,” says Elliott. “It’s very, very hard to forecast.” His company cleans casinos in Reno and Lake Tahoe.

Many casinos lack the storage space to house products, so the distributor should be in close contact with the key purchasing decision-maker at a casino, and be ready to jump when they say they need more of a certain product.

When asked what the No. 1 requirement is to supply to casinos, Spallone says on-time delivery tops the list. “Back orders are usually a no-no,” he says. It’s common that a product will be ordered on the same day it is needed. A casino might fax or e-mail a product need to more than one distributor, and sit back and wait for the best price and availability. The lowest price usually wins.

“Price plays more of a role now than ever,” says Elliott. “We’re really supplying non-revenue products.” Upper-level management doesn’t view cleaning products as a ticket to high revenue, he says, which is a struggle when trying to seal a supply deal.

There are many challenges with cleaning a casino, challenges not found at a sports arena or an office park. Cleaning cycles are compressed due to heavy traffic, says Lou Richards, vice president and general manager of Waxie Sanitary Supply in Las Vegas. Carpets are shampooed weekly or nightly, depending on the amount of pedestrian traffic in any given week.

Encourage your employees to look at how they will “attack” a hotel room, says Hraba. Will they work in teams? Or will they each adopt a room and clean it from top to bottom?

Purchasing departments are tasked with the responsibility of buying sanitary products, so it’s best to woo them on a personal and professional level when peddling your product.

Sales representatives for Lake Tahoe Supply Co. make twice-a-month visits to a casino during its graveyard shift, when they know they can have personal contact with the purchasing department. “A lot of decisions are made during this time,” says Spallone.

“The effort is initially on the distributor himself. You have to say, ‘Here I am. These are my products. Let’s get to know each other better,’” says Bank. He suggests, when wooing a casino, that distributors demonstrate the product in front of the decision-maker and a small audience of cleaning employees.

“One of the things they always look at is the ownership and the officers list,” says Richards, adding that he makes sure he publishes a list of officers for his company, which has offices in Las Vegas, San Diego, Utah, Arizona and Colorado. About 50 percent of its business is supplying to casinos.

Following up a cleaning demonstration with a training program is a good idea, and shows the distributor is concerned about the product’s use and performance. “We do a lot of training for cleaning employees at our facility,” says Richards.

Like other customers, one labor problem that the human resources departments at casinos struggle with is high turnover. In Atlantic City, says Bank, it’s especially hard to find workers since the closest metropolitan areas are Philadelphia (65 miles away) and New York City (100 miles).

It’s important to have adequate staffing at all hours of the day, and have managers on call in the event of a major mess or a demanding order from a casino manager. It’s also important to educate cleaning crews on remaining “invisible” to casino customers. Electrical cords should be out of the way of walkers, and janitors should do their best to work quietly and efficiently.

Improving the Odds
There are no official rules for supplying to casinos, just etiquette that distributors learn through trial-and-error, and from immersing themselves into the marketplace. A casino’s needs can change with the ebb and flow of tourist traffic, including the time of year and current weather conditions. For example, the millennial New Year’s Eve celebration on the Las Vegas Strip might have a different feel than a Saturday in February along the snow-covered Atlantic City boardwalk.

Elliott, of Inland Supply in Reno, Nev., says tourism in his area (including convention bookings) is down 10 to 15 percent, thus cheapening the room rates and taxes. Not to mention nixing the chance a casino will increase the number of cleaning supplies it orders.

There are, however, more and more casinos going up all the time. The casino market does not end at Vegas or Atlantic City. Riverboat gambling is becoming more popular, and Indian gambling casinos are scattered across the country. And by looking at trends in revenue growth in recent years, casinos are sure to continue to be a hotspot for distributors to consider.

Still, it’s important for every distributor to keep up on casino trends and needs. Despite 15 years in the casino business, Bank never gets bored. “Every time I walk into a casino, it’s another learning experience,” he says.

Kristine Hansen is a freelance writer based in Madison, Wis.
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Casino Jobs: Strength In Numbers
During the past year, more than 14,000 new jobs were created in the commercial casino industry, led by Nevada (5,882), Indiana (4,550) and Michigan (2,940). Tribal casinos provided roughly 200,000 additional jobs nationwide. Below are totals:

Sources: State Gaming Regulatory Agencies, State Gaming Associations




POSTED ON: 9/1/2002