MIDDLETOWN TWP., Pennsylvania — A giant letter M, maybe 60 feet tall and 40 feet wide, sits at the intersection of East Lincoln Highway and Oxford Valley Road down here in lower Bucks County, the most working-class part of Philadelphia’s suburbs.
Above the M is a massive LED billboard, which on a Monday morning is alternating between ads for Parx Casino and ads for a marijuana dispensary.
A few miles down the road at Sparky’s, a Caribbean-themed bar in Bristol Township that opens at 10 a.m., customers are glued to the screens of “Pennsylvania Skill Games,” essentially video slot machines that fill the corners of dive bars and corner stores.
A few doors over, at the New Madison Restaurant, a handful of retired ladies wear orange golf shirts emblazoned with the Parx Casino logo on the shoulder.
And at the Bristol campus of Bucks Community College, the poll workers are setting up for the first day of early voting. One woman in her 50s explains that her election-season work is her “Christmas money.” A colleague in her 70s replies, “To be honest, it’s my gambling money!”
In lower Bucks County, the most working-class part of Philly’s suburbs, gambling is everywhere. Everett, my bartender at Sparky’s, tells me that many of his peers in their 20s have had their lives derailed by sports gambling apps.
Ubiquitous gambling and pot are hardly unique to Bucks County or to Pennsylvania. In fact, the state has stricter marijuana laws than do its neighbors, including New Jersey, just across the Delaware River. But spend a couple of days down in this part of the Philadelphia area, and you’ll feel you are bombarded by vice.
Around 8 p.m. on Monday, during a lull at Sparky’s, there are only about 10 patrons total, and most of them are gathered around the three “Skill Games” machines. Two are shaped like arcade machines and sit on the floor. Another machine sits on a high-top bar table, like a 1990s personal computer, but the table is equipped with an extra-comfy Pennsylvania Skill Games chair.
These “skill games” are fundamentally video slots. They offer mindless gambling played by touching a computer screen that flashes with bright lights. The “skill” part is basically a lie. After losing your money at some stylized game of chance, such as Amigos Locos (starring gunslinging Mexican characters), you might earn a free spin if you can solve a memory puzzle. This tiny introduction of games that don’t rely on chance has, for years, put these machines beyond the reach of the state’s gambling laws.
So in every region of the state, you’ll see these machines, with gamblers hunched over them. But look a bit closer, and you’ll see a geographic pattern: They’re much more common in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood than in Chestnut Hill. Sparky’s, with its $3 Miller Lites and yes-smoking policy, has a few of these machines, but you won’t find them at the Capital Grille or the Green Parrot up in swanky Newtown.
It’s similar to pot. Yes, Doylestown, an upper-crust suburb in central Bucks, has one dispensary, but it’s the only one within many miles. Meanwhile, Sparky’s is around the corner from the Beyond Hello dispensary and a 15-minute drive from two others.
The vice economy is growing in America today, and that growth is concentrated in the working class. Put another way, working-class life today in America has less marriage, less churchgoing, and less long-term employment than it did a generation ago, while that same working-class life has a lot more pot and a lot more gambling.
Around 8 p.m. Monday, one very gray-haired couple sat at the end of Sparky’s bar, as close as possible to one of the arcade-style video machines. They took turns going up to gamble away their money while vaping. The man looked up at the television as Monday Night Football cut to a ceremony for former New Orleans Saints star Steve Gleason, who is wheelchair-bound and paralyzed by ALS.
“I’d rather be dead than live like that,” the man said before returning to his video slots.
A group of 20-somethings arrives, and one patron walks over with a smile and starts waving her arms toward her face and inhaling. “I’m trying to get high,” she says, joking about the unmistakable scent they are giving off. This group huddles around the “skill games” machine near the bathroom.
“They pay out cash, like slots,” one young man informed me. “That’s why the casinos don’t like them.”
Sure enough, there’s a case of Baptists and bootleggers going on here.
Parx Casino in lower Bucks is the largest casino in Pennsylvania. The parent company, Greenwood Gaming and Racing, has lobbied the legislature and filed suit in an effort to get the “skill games” classified as what they are: gambling.
You see, the casino owners are horrified that there is gambling going on at Sparky’s. They want all the gambling to go on at Parx.
And it appears the casinos have won. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court recently ruled that these gambling machines are, in fact, gambling machines and thus covered by the Pennsylvania laws that govern video slots. “Skill games” need to be regulated and taxed, but there is no framework in current state law for the regulation and taxation of video slots in dive bars and corner stores.
WALKABILITY BIT FOR CHILDREN
Absent legislative or court action, these machines have to be shut down on Oct. 16.
Then it’s off to the casinos, guys.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
