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Herbst Knows Slots

The Herbst family has a long history with gas. They own a chain of gas stations, and at some point they decided to take a drive through Primm – located in Southern California. They briefly thought it might be a good idea to invest in some casinos there, but then they kept on driving.

However, they changed their minds and bought three casinos in Primm, the whole time wondering who comes to these casinos in this little nothing town – when 45 minutes up the road was the Las Vegas Strip. That question doesn’t really matter though, because people do. They stop there all the time, and those casinos bring in a whole lot of money.

So they paid $400 million for Whiskey Pete’s, Primm Valley and Buffalo Bills, because at some point they made more money than many of the casinos on the Las Vegas Strip. However, now they make about 40% of what they did then, but that doesn’t worry the Herbst’s. But the Herbsts are used to working for their money – after all Herbst Gaming started as a Chicago gas station in 1938 and grew from there.

Herbst Gaming started as a gas station and grew into an empire. IN the 1950’s Ed Herbst, patriarch of the family, scaled back after the oil crisis, and started looking into gaming. In the ‘80’ his grandson’s put slot machines at their gas stations, and Herbst became the biggest slot machine operator in Nevada that did not own a casino. They now operate more than 13,000 slot machines in the state, and most of them are in convenience stores.

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