I enjoyed this article from last month's New York Times. Thought maybe someone else might enjoy it too.

The casinos here follow an old tradition of giving away money to make more money.
The thinking is this. If it is free -- a meal, a chip or plain cash -- the gamblers will come. And once they come, they will spend -- from their own pockets. The casinos did not count on people like Linda Zhang.
A fragile little woman of 60, Miss Zhang lives in a $10-a-night hostel in Queens. Every day she comes by bus to the Trump Taj Mahal. The casino gives her a voucher worth $20 just for showing up.
After subtracting the $11 price of her round-trip bus ticket, Miss Zhang is $9 ahead of the game and only a dollar short of her rent. She has no interest in gambling and follows other day-tripping Chinese immigrants to a church soup kitchen for lunch.
"Then I walk around," she said sweetly, "and watch other people play."
Every day, hundreds of similarly frugal Chinese arrive here on the dozens of big private gambling buses that ply the streets of New York's immigrant neighborhoods, squeezing every bit of fun they can get by gambling or, in some cases, not gambling the casinos' dollars.
In China, they were factory hands, farmers and clerks who saw little but hardship and deprivation. Some worked in New York sweatshops, eking out a living on $25 a day. Their ability to cope with the mysteries of Atlantic City, then, is a source of pride. To them, Atlantic City is a big wonderful free holiday, day after day after day.
To the casinos, though, they are a maddening reminder of a munificent marketing policy that backfired.
The thrifty retirees do not go unnoticed by the legions of security guards who patrol the casinos' vast and noisy gambling rooms. The Chinese pounce for a stray quarter on the floor; the guards pounce for them. The Chinese amble, looking for a slot machine that has been played but has not yet paid; the guards toss them out.
Their main nemesis, the Chinese gamblers say, is a guard at Bally's whom they have nicknamed Dog. Sometimes, they say, he grabs their vouchers and rips them up.
"I think they pick on the Chinese people because we don't have a lot of money," said Li Wan, a casino devotee who comes almost every day. "They make us lose face."
The cat-and-mouse game, played without common language or clear rules, frightens many of the Chinese bus gamblers.
Chengping Li, a former Chinese collective farm secretary, said he feels like a king when he wins a meal ticket for the all-you-can-eat buffet at the Taj, where he happily piles his plate high with sweet-and-sour ribs, turkey, meatloaf and crab legs, courtesy of Donald Trump.
But Mr. Li, a robust man of 69, said he did not dare come to Atlantic City without protection: a small ceramic vial labeled, in Chinese characters, "emergency heart attack medicine."
"Some of the casinos discriminate against Chinese," said another bus regular, Hong Zhe Xu, 68. "They don't help us if a machine breaks down or if we have a question. They just ignore us -- and it's not just a question of language, because they help other people who just gesture to them."
The casinos say everyone is welcome in their gaudy gambling rooms, whether gambler or gawker, high roller or retiree on a $9 budget.
"They don't have to be high rollers to be important to us," said Brian Cahill, a spokesman for Park Place Entertainment, which owns Bally's hotel and casino, as well as Caesars, the Claridge and the Atlantic City Hilton.
But Atlantic City's interest in bargain-hunting bus customers is flagging. Over all, whether blue-haired retirees from Pennsylvania or immigrant adventurers from Queens, they are not a profitable segment of the market. Bus customers make up 25 percent of the visitors to Atlantic City casinos each year; they account for just 15 percent of the casinos' revenue, according to the New Jersey Casino Control Commission.
So the trend now in the industry is to cut back on incentives to bus customers in favor of "comps," or free rooms or chips, to gamblers who are known to be big spenders, said Michael Pollock, publisher of Gaming Industry Observer in Atlantic City.
"With the comps," he said, "they know in advance roughly what the customer likes and what the customer is worth. It's better than throwing money at the bus customer."
As the casinos have invested more in customers who stay overnight, the number of gamblers arriving by bus has been shrinking since the late 1980's.
Four years ago, more than 10 million people, or 41 percent of all casino visitors, came by bus, enticed by various incentives and vouchers. Last year, according to casino regulators, the number was down to 8 million.
For the Chinese retirees, a small insular planet inside the larger bus-gambler universe, the trip to the casinos is an antidote to boredom and loneliness. And Atlantic City is proof that America is the land of opportunity.
"They get kicked out because the casinos know they go for the money, not for the gambling," said Pearl Lin, a travel agent in Manhattan's Chinatown. "They get $10 or $15 sometimes from the casinos. Fifteen times six days, figuring they take one day of rest, they can make $90. That's pretty good."
But she is full of tender admiration. "They're very persistent, these elderly, because they're survivors," Ms. Lin said, laughing. "And they love this country because the Chinese Communists never treated them so well."
Many of the Chinese gamblers have discovered that they can get a nice free lunch here just for stopping by the Victory Deliverance Temple in the First Presbyterian Church, strategically located across the street from the Taj Mahal. Volunteers there serve free hot lunches to the needy. They do not turn anyone away.
"They're very nice to us there," said Xiu Ping Fu, a dark-haired woman of 71 who heads to the church as soon as she steps off the bus from New York City. "Plus they let us take food with us."
The daily appearance of the Chinese and other bus gamblers has surprised the church staff and left them a bit concerned about their increasingly strained resources.
"Sometimes I think we should put a sign up that there's no free lunch," said the pastor, the Rev. John Scotland. "It does seem that whoever is responsible for bringing these people to town should take some responsibility for them."
Over in the casinos, where gamblers are swallowed up in the flashing lights and incessant ding-ding-ding of the slot machines, the prudent ways of the Chinese retirees may be less appreciated.
"We go in and we don't want to play the $20 right away," said Wan Yi Fang, a sprightly man of 77. "So we watch for a machine where somebody plays for a long time but doesn't win. That's a lucky machine -- that's what we think -- and we figure it's got to give money soon."
He said his system, typical of unsophisticated slot players who do not believe the jackpots are random, seems to attract unwanted scrutiny from security guards at some casinos. They sometimes eject him.
"Sometimes if you can't go in one door, you can get in another," Mr. Fang said. "But sometimes we don't want to make a scene."
The Chinese gamblers have come to rate the casinos on a friendliness scale. The Taj gets their highest rating. Bally's is considered the least welcoming.
Several of the Chinese men have written what amounts to a manifesto outlining their experiences. They said some guards do not even let them enter the casino at Bally's.
One said a Bally's guard held him in an office near the casino for more than one hour, just for walking through Bally's on the interior corridor that connects all the casinos.
"All of us have had the experience of being pushed out the door at some casinos," the men wrote. "But there should be no arbitrary treatment of gamblers. Only by doing this can casinos have good business and make money."
The clash of expectations, and the communications gulf, were clear on a recent visit to Bally's Wild Wild West Casino.
A Chinese woman from the Flushing bus wandered the vast floor of blinking slot machines for 15 minutes, finally settling on one called the River Gambler. She was about to drop in a quarter when a security guard grabbed her arm.
At first the guard, Clarence Broxton, accused the woman of stealing. When her English-speaking daughter demanded to know what her mother had stolen, he responded, "She knows what I'm talking about."
Pressed further, Mr. Broxton changed his tack and said that the Chinese woman had to leave the casino "if she's not going to play."
Mr. Cahill, the spokesman for Bally's, declined to comment on the experiences recounted by the Chinese or on the specific incident at the cowboy-themed casino. He said only, "We encourage people to visit and enjoy it, and whether they play or not, that's up to the individual."
Even those bus gamblers who say they have run into similar problems are not about to give up on Atlantic City.
"Sometimes I am upset about problems with the guards," said Rong Hua Xie, a retired government clerk from Shanghai who brings a simple lunch of bread and fruit on his daily trips from Flushing. "But it's still fun to be with all the other people like me. We all take care of each other."