A four star hotel room. Marble bathroom. Two queen beds. Pool complex outside. A tower with four thousand rooms in it, on some of the most expensive land in the western United States.
Tuesday night rate: $39.
Try that in Boston. Try it in Chicago. Try it in a mid sized city with no ocean and nothing to do. You will pay double for a room with a view of a parking structure and a continental breakfast involving a waffle iron.
So how does Las Vegas do it?
Most people answer instantly. Gambling. They make it back at the tables.
Gif by imaginedragons on Giphy
That answer is about forty percent correct, and the missing sixty percent is the interesting part. Because the Las Vegas business model quietly broke somewhere in the last twenty years, got rebuilt into something different, and the $39 room survived the transition for reasons that have almost nothing to do with the original logic.