We had a few dozen customers, and "percent of wallet" (figuring out how much money they walk into the casino with vs. how much they leave with) is a standard metric in casino marketing everywhere. You can figure out their paycheck based on them coming the same day of the week and losing the same amount multiple times, and market to then to ensure they lose their whole paycheck more often.

It's trivially easy to spot gambling addicts in the data, and in markets with better protections for gambling addicts they have to approach marketing quite differently. In some places you're allowed to ban yourself from the casino, and it's super illegal for the casino to market to you, so there are tons of protections to prevent all emails, texts, phone calls from hosts, physical mailers, ads of any form from reaching you.

The suicide anecdote is what caused me to quit. I'm ashamed to admit I asked my team to use an "IsDeceased" flag in the calculation for host bonus compensation, for when a patron dies while assigned to them. After that, I tried to transfer to the non-casino corner of the business where they were trying to sell our software to sports stadiums, and when they killed that off a few months later, I left the company. This was circa 2016, at a casino in the rust belt, but I'm not going to get more specific than that.

I appreciate this comment. You will see that the modern day capitalistic system, in general, punishes anyone with even a smidgen of the moral compass you have. The world of finance is this in spades. Having worked on wall street for pretty much my entire adult career, having gone on to found my own fund. I came to an epiphany through a few fucked up experiences that my investors did not give two flying fucks what kind of person I was as long as I was generating solid returns. Moral compass be damned.

So, casino industry perhaps is a convenient pinata when in reality it's not the specific industry, it's the system.