Dozens of fluorescent machines line the walls of a dark room. At 11:30 in the morning, a few customers are already trying their luck at Zort’s Prime Time Casino in North Sioux City.
Owner Jim Zortman said the facility closed for ten weeks during the pandemic, but the business roared back to full capacity when restrictions faded.
“A lot of the stimulus checks and those kinds of things actually propagated or enhanced the business,” Zortman said. “We had a lot more people in, new faces, new players, those kind of things and they kept coming in or whatever some of them they obviously developed and like our location.”
Zortman says he’s having a hard time finding the staff to keep up with business.
Clark Hepper is the deputy executive director of the South Dakota Lottery. He said the pandemic initially caused a drop in sales.
“The number of entertainment options were very limited, and you were starting to see even some of those local bars starting to open up and our video lottery establishments were a beneficiary of some of that opening up,” Hepper said.
Lottery operators are also making improvements. Wade LaRoche is the director of marketing for the South Dakota Lottery.
“Operators are actually choosing to utilize newer machines and those have newer graphics and kind of extended play and just more features for our players,” he said.
South Dakota video lottery machines have netted about $275 million as of May 2021. That’s 30 percent higher than the same period last year.
The lottery department says video lottery will contribute about $150 million in tax revenues to the state in 2021.
