Thursday, July 24, 2008

Told Ya So: 73 Fired At Trump

KVBC-TV's Steve Crupi reported last night a terrific scoop -- the Review-Journal doesn't even have it today -- that the Trump International Hotel & Tower is in such doldrums they're firing 73 employees. That's a fifth of the workforce. Me thinks this is more proof that they'll never build the second tower in the image used below behind the anchors.


Gee, what's that I wrote in the Weekly just last week? Oh! That's right: "We in the media will also be writing many stories in coming years about the struggle of this property. It is the best-executed version of the worst-considered idea in Vegas today."

Crupi reports that the layoffs are due to the lack of closings caused by the mortgage meltdown. But didn't Mr. Trump tell Howard Stutz in the Review-Journal a month ago: "Some of my buyers are richer than the banks! We're working with people and I think we're doing pretty well!"

And, of course, there's this little gem of a bald-faced lie from
The Apprentice champ Stefanie Schaeffer, marketing veep for Trump’s Vegas project, on "The Strip" in March when asked about the impact of the credit crunch:

“We’re in the process of closing right now, and thus far we haven’t really had a problem. Everything’s been going pretty smoothly. Then again, when you talk about Cosmo and you talk about some of these other projects that stopped mid-construction or even pre-construction, you’re not talking about the Trump product, and the Trump brand carries again the Trump name, which pretty much says it all. People know they’re getting a level of excellence that is not only unsurpassed anywhere in the world but is something that speaks for itself. So even in a poor market, we’ve really been relatively unaffected.”

Ya don't say. If it wasn't for her hubris in talking smack about another project when she had to have known they were facing a rough road themselves, I might not rerun this quote so often.

(Disclosure: My partner, Miles, is executive producer at KVBC. He's also away tending to a family matter, so he was uninvolved in this post.)

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