Now Even Fun is Getting Too Expensive

A carefree half-decade for the American consumer — who questioned five-dollar coffee six months ago? — is grinding to a panic stop across the economy.

As surely as the slowdown is exposing weak retailers, anemic growth and nearly zero credit eventually had to hit home. Analysts, for instance, worry that theme parks this summer will drag down earnings for the big media companies that own them.

Both Coke and Pepsi are rolling out "recession-sized” single bottles, down to 12 ounces or smaller from the 20-ouncers, and 50 cents cheaper.

Even Las Vegas, the fun capital of the country, is hurting bad.

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Whole families once jetted into town for long weekends. Now the city is reporting gambling revenues off by 4 percent (any decline is a rarity) and conventions down more than 10 percent.

Meanwhile, what happens in Vegas apparently also happens in Zurich.

Casino operator Tropicana Entertainment said this week it will file for bankruptcy. It missed a payment on a $1.32 billion loan with Credit Suisse. Tropicana has 11,000 employees and $1 billion in sales.

Room rates all over town are falling even as new casinos break ground and 40,000 new rooms are due to go up. Drive-in traffic, business from local gamblers, is being crimped by high gasoline prices.

Add to that one of the fastest-cooling real estate markets in the country, and you have a mess. The most recent S&P/Case-Shiller housing index puts Las Vegas down 23 percent over 12 months after growing annually by 50 percent or more during 2004 and 2005.

In response, Las Vegas is courting Europeans, whose euros go farther than ever before here.

"Bachelor parties in Vegas are now all the rage for soon-to-be-wed fellows from Australia and the U.K., for instance, because it's so cheap to get there," Robert LaFleur, stock analyst for Susquehanna Financial Services, tells Newsweek.

"Right now it's an easy sell to get people from overseas.”

Meanwhile, General Electric’s consumer finance arm, GE Money, says it will stop writing loans for boats and motorhomes, sure to slow down sales of high-end recreational toys.

GE said it would lay off 100 people in the move.

"We just really looked at a lot of different alternatives and are facing a challenging environment and ultimately came to the decision that we needed to invest our resources and capital in areas where we could see good return," Cristy Williams, a spokeswoman for GE Money, told Reuters.

Or, perhaps, nobody is asking for these loans anymore, anyway, so why keep up a sales office?

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