Dave Liebrader, Las Vegas

Tue, Mar 11, 2008 (2:04 a.m.)

Bravo to the Las Vegas Sun for publishing a long-overdue story on the transformation of the Las Vegas service industry (“Nightclub nightmare costs couple a bundle,” Sunday).

For 95 percent of its history Las Vegas was famous for providing value to locals and visitors. This desert outpost was built by those who recognized that keeping customers happy was a surefire way to keep them coming back.

Anyone who has lived here for any length of time has his own story or stories of favorable treatment he received at this restaurant or at that bar. It’s part of the legend of the town the perks, the comps, the special treatment.

Stories like these kept visitors entertained and went a long way toward marketing the town to out-of-towners. Sadly, those days appear to be over. LAX and Pure, and dozens of others like them, have turned the concept of “Las Vegas value” upside down.

The two-bottle rule was bad enough. Now we learn that security guards are running “protection rackets” in clubs where once a simple $20 tip to a maitre d’ was good enough to secure a table. Spreading $500 around to a bunch of high school graduates just to earn the privilege of paying $375 for a bottle of booze will not leave any club patron happy. Likewise, busboys taking those full, expensive drinks while guests are on the dance floor will engender outright hostility.

This isn’t the type of hospitality that built this town. The sooner the Internal Revenue Service and the feds investigate and, yes, close down these shakedown traps, the sooner locals can get back to rebuilding the town’s reputation.