With black stilettos, a blond bob and a slash of red lipstick, Milanese accountant Maria Teresa De Gasperi is dressed to get a night out in Switzerland. Her visits to Lugano’s casino have grown less frequent as her gambling price range declined.

“A lot, lot significantly less,” she said, referring to her spending whilst sitting on a sofa in the casino’s brightly lit foyer.

The Swiss town of Lugano has been home to a casino for the previous century and about 80 percent from the gamblers are Italian, based on its management. The town, south of the Alps beside a sparkling blue lake and palm trees, is about an hour from Italy’s economic hub of Milan by vehicle or train, and at the frontier of Europe’s prosperous north.

A liberalization with the predominantly Catholic country’s once-strict laws has helped gambling acquire prominence in Italy, exactly where the economy is mired in its longest slump in greater than 20 years. That modify, combined together with the strength from the Swiss franc, is making occasions tough for casinos in Switzerland’s Italian-speaking canton of Ticino. The franc appreciated by about 25 percent against the euro through the past five years. It rose 0.2 % to 1.2365 per euro at 11:33 a.m. in Zurich.

The gaming industry’s malaise stands in contrast to a lot in the rest with the Swiss economy, which has managed to recover in the contraction it suffered in 2009. Inside the first quarter of 2013, Swiss development outpaced Germany’s, by far the most resilient economy on the 17-member currency location.

Gross income for Switzerland’s 21 casinos was down 24 percent final year compared with 2008, when the economic crisis erupted together with the collapse of New York-based Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., official statistics show. The decline occurred even as new casinos opened, like a single in Zurich.
Income Slide

Swiss casinos suffered an eight % drop in revenue in 2012 to 757 million francs ($800 million), in accordance with the Federation of Swiss Casinos, with not a single one in a position to retain income at the preceding year’s level. The decline suffered by casinos in French- and German-speaking cantons was frequently less pronounced final year, the federation’s information show.

At the Admiral casino in Mendrisio, just five minutes from the Italian border, gaming income fell 12 percent to 64 million francs final year. Lugano’s casino suffered a 21 % decline, the largest of any in Switzerland, to 54 million francs.

“Last year, men and women have been spending less,” stated Luca Antonini, manager of the Lugano betting house as he sat in his Spartan workplace down a hallway from 3 floors of blinking lights, bars, slot machines and tables of blackjack and roulette. “Now we’re beginning to find out fewer guests as well.”
Household Debt

Italy has traditionally been a nation of savers, whose penchant for placing funds aside has helped fund the government’s debt, the euro’s second-biggest relative to gross domestic solution. Household debt in Italy stood at 45 percent, compared using a euro-area average of 64 percent, as outlined by data in the European Central Bank. As unemployment rises to greater than 12 percent, Italians are increasingly eating into their nest eggs to shield themselves from poverty.

In the past decade, Italian laws forbidding gambling have been relaxed. Slot machines and video lottery machines are now authorized, in what the government says is often a drive to produce the once-clandestine market a lot more transparent and much easier to regulate.

Critics of the decision say the rule transform is poor for society. Each and every 12th individual who plays machines will grow to be hooked, Suedtirol On the internet quoted the region’s customer association as saying final year.

Maurizio Cimarelli, a spokesman for the Italian state’s gaming agency AAMS, mentioned the liberalization meant persons merely switched to legal gaming. “All this has performed is bring to light numbers previously hidden,” Cimarelli said in an e-mail.
Spending Trends

In Italy, spending on various forms of gambling and gaming rose 9 % to 87.1 billion euros in 2012 from a year earlier, based on AAMS data, even as the economy is headed for its eighth quarter of contraction and joblessness could be the highest given that no less than 1977.

There is certainly no figure for typical spending per gambler for final year, in accordance with the AAMS. The agency says there are actually 380,000 slot machines and 50,000 video lottery machines in operation in arcades across the country, specifically in densely populated regions about Rome, Milan, and Turin. There are actually just a handful of formal casinos with tables in Italy.

“I don’t take large risks,” stated a middle-aged Italian who would only give his 1st name of Alberto, as he exited the Lugano casino not lengthy just after midnight and dashed to his auto inside the pouring rain. “Sometimes I come here, or I go to other places like St. Moritz.”
Unemployment Rises

Within a sign of just how much the sector is getting squeezed, the number of workers at the Lugano casino was down 43 percent in 2012 from 2008 along with the headcount in neighboring Mendrisio shrank by 25 percent inside the similar period, in line with the Swiss Federal Gaming Board. The jobless price in Switzerland was three.2 % in June, compared with two.5 % 5 years earlier.

To attract guests, Antonini, the Lugano casino’s manager, is looking for to make the most of his establishment’s lakeside terrace to market dining and dancing as well as gambling.

“We’re hoping to diversify our offering,” he mentioned. There are actually also much more video slot machines because female prospects often choose them to tables, he stated.