Muoio worked as an event coordinator for a third-party electricity supplier and carefully choreographed the energy needs for exhibitors, presenters and participants at fairs held in the huge hall.
“These are very long days and you are standing all the time,” said Muoio, 39. “Sometimes I don’t even have time to eat.”
During a typical January, CES’s presence in and around Las Vegas is unmistakable. Hotel prices soar, restaurants and clubs are crowded and workers like Muoio register overtime to ensure that everything goes smoothly for the big lucrative show and related events. Last year, an estimated 170,000 CES attendees generated $ 169 million in direct spending and a broader economic impact of $ 291.2 million, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.
The move, which aims to prioritize health and safety during the Covid-19 pandemic, serves as yet another blow to a city already shaken by the current economic and health crisis.
Money running out
The job market in Las Vegas was the hardest hit among major metropolitan areas in the United States during the pandemic. The region is heavily dependent on travel, discretionary spending, business conferences and large gatherings, but it has seen those taps shut.
After his leave in March, Muoio was definitively fired in August.
Since then, she says she has applied for hundreds of jobs – including coordinating events at home and positions in customer service or marketing – but has yet to achieve anything permanent.
Living without health insurance and awaiting an application for state unemployment insurance that has been pending since August, Muoio said he is lucky to have some money saved for an eventual payment for a home.
“That money is falling slowly, slowly,” she said. “I’m finishing.”
Brandon Geyer is facing a similar situation. He’s been out of work since March.
“In March, when this happened for the first time, I had the impression that we would be closed for a few weeks, nothing much,” he said. “Another week goes by, and another week goes by, and suddenly, I haven’t been back to work since March.”
For nearly 24 years, Geyer, 49, was a manager at a bar on Main Street Station, a casino, brewery and hotel in downtown Las Vegas that remains temporarily closed due to the pandemic. And while the crowds grew whenever the CES arrived in the city, Main Street Station attracted a loyal clientele, many of whom Geyer has come to know well over the years.
Geyer said he is grateful to receive unemployment insurance, that his wife still has the job and that they had some money in savings to support themselves and their two children. The Local Cooking Workers Union 226 also helped to obtain weekly food assistance and groceries.
But the loss of a full and stable income is taking its toll, Geyer said. He is hopeful that his union’s pressure for Clark County, Nevada, to adopt a “Right of Return” policy, will be implemented, requiring employers to offer dismissed workers the right to return to their former jobs when companies reopen. .
“We are just wondering when we are going to get back to work,” he said.
The Main Street station owned by Boyd Gaming is expected to reopen sometime in 2021, CEO Keith Smith said during the company’s most recent earnings conference call in October.
Scarily empty
At that time, last year, optimism was high that 2020 – and CES 2021 – would be quite prosperous for Las Vegas, said Steve Hill, executive director of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.
“We had defined [room tax dollars] records in seven of the previous 10 months, “he said.” It looked like it would certainly continue. “
Instead, the new 1.4 million-square-foot West Hall is eerily empty, Hill said.
The expectation of both visitor authority and CES organizers is that the event will return to Las Vegas in 2022 and beyond. Although it probably looks a little different when I return.
“The future of the events is likely to include a digital component,” officials at the Consumer Technology Association, which hosts CES, said in a statement. “The event industry had to innovate during this pandemic, change business models and adapt to our new circumstances.”
On Monday night, more than two dozen marquees on properties along the famous Las Vegas Strip were lit up with the message: “We miss you, CES. I can’t wait to get you back in 2022.”
‘All bets are off’
For cities like Las Vegas to see significant economic improvement, people will have to feel comfortable traveling again, being indoors again and willing to spend money, said John Restrepo, director of RCG Economics, based in Las Vegas.
And until the vaccines spread “all bets are off,” said Restrepo.
This time, Restrepo predicts that it will take at least three years for the state to reach the consistent annual growth rates seen in the main economic indicators before the pandemic. It will take even longer, he said, to return to real levels of jobs, sales taxes, gaming revenues and congressmen.
“It will be a long walk out of this routine here in southern Nevada,” he said.