One of our favorite casino urban legends involves carpets. So the story goes, casino carpets have busy patterns to disorient players, keeping them on the casino floor longer. Or they’re designed to keep players awake.
It falls apart once you begin to think about it. You’ve probably been to a few casinos in your day – when’s the last time a casino carpet made you dizzy or otherwise distracted you into the arms of another slot machine? When has a casino carpet discouraged you from going to bed?
Here’s a much more realistic scenario: Casino carpets are busy to hide numerous stains and the wear and tear of millions of feet upon them.
The amount of people who traverse a casino floor every day is far busier than a standard hotel, or your home for that matter. Many people are getting drinks, lots of casinos (although the number is shrinking over time) still allow smoking, and because of the heavy equipment atop them the carpets aren’t replaced particularly often either.
This means you need good industrial carpeting that not only can withstand that abuse, but also hide stains well. Busier carpets, quite simply, do just that – the patterns will help hide the spilled glasses of wine and cocktails that will inevitably find their way onto the floor.
Casino carpets, odd as they often are, will also be factored into a design of a casino. There’s a reason why you don’t generally see casino carpets replicated across a bunch of properties, but are instead unique to each casino. It tends to become part of the unique identifiers that tell you you’re at the Plaza, Park MGM, or Foxwoods.
So while it may be fun to pin the busy-ness of the carpet on a casino plot to get you to spend more money, the real answer is more benign – it’s so you don’t notice how messy players can be sometimes, and how the carpet will take the brunt of that.
