Unemployed Las Vegas residents are now selling their blood plasma to make money as the rip-off city’s jobs market tanks amid an ongoing tourism slump.
Isaiah Thompson and Shawn Herron, two friends from Sin City, are among those who have been struggling to make ends meet as Las Vegas faced a loss of 4,300 jobs in August compared to the prior month.
Thompson told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that while looking for a job over the past few months, he has been sending out at least 20 applications per day, several days per week.
Herron shared a similarly grueling experience of applying to more than 100 jobs before he finally landed a warehouse gig recently.
In the meantime, the two of them were selling plasma to get by. Thompson estimated he could make upwards $800 per month that way, which he used to pay his rent.
Thompson said the Las Vegas job market was strong three or four years ago and it was easy to find a job. But he said today, the job market is ‘honestly terrible.’
‘Once it’s gone, it’s hard to find another job,’ Herron added.
Las Vegas has been struggling recently as tourists have been coming to the city in fewer numbers, causing a negative ripple effect to the rest of Nevada’s economy which relies heavily on the industry.
Isaiah Thompson (left) and Shawn Herron (right) have been selling their plasma over the last few months while they looked for work
Las Vegas has been struggling recently as tourists have been coming to the city in fewer numbers
Nevada faced a loss of 3,800 jobs in August compared to the prior month, and candidates have been flocking to job fairs
Tourists are giving Vegas the cold shoulder over soaring prices for hotels, food, drinks and casinos that many have branded extortionate.
Many visitors from Canada – a market which is particularly important to Sin City – are staying away after boycotting the United States over President Trump’s threats to make their country the 51st US state.
In 2024, tourism contributed nearly $100 billion to Nevada’s economy, supporting about a quarter of the state’s jobs, generating 22 percent of the state’s wages and contributing 34 percent of tax dollars to the general fund.
So when the number of visitors to Las Vegas slipped 7.8 percent this year in the period of January through August when compared to the same period last year, all of the state’s industries and the state’s job market felt the hit.
In August, Nevada lost 4,400 construction jobs month-over-month, which was the worst construction job loss in the country by raw number and percent. The real estate industry is the state’s second largest economic engine after tourism and hospitality.
Sales at food and beverage outlets in Clark County, where Las Vegas is located, slipped two percent between June of this year and last year when compared with the same prior 12-month stretch.
That may not sound like a lot, but it represented a loss of $256.5 million in sales.
Nevada’s private sector lost a total of 6,000 jobs between July and August according to a September report from the Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation.
David Schmidt, chief economist at the department, said the food services industry was hardest hit after the construction industry.
Nevada’s August unemployment rate of 5.6 percent was the fourth worst in the country among metropolitan areas with less than one million people, according to federal officials.
A quiet bar in Las Vegas’ Poker Palace, which is set to close
The state’s long-term job figures look a little less bleak than the month-over-month losses, but they are not very encouraging either.
Year-over-year, Nevada lost 1,303 jobs in August, which is statistically insignificant and represents a zero percent change in the state’s total of 1,570,100 jobs. The overall labor market is ‘largely stationary,’ according to state officials.
Schmidt said fewer people have been quitting their jobs and layoffs have been increasing. He added that hiring has not fallen off a cliff, but it has ‘leveled off.’
Although the employment situation in Nevada is particularly grim, the state’s situation is reflective of a broader trend across the US.
In August, the entire country saw a year-over-year increase of just 22,000 jobs, which was a mere 0.93 percent gain, and there has been little growth since April, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
For some perspective, the US added 142,000 jobs year-over-year in August 2024, and it added 187,000 jobs year-over-year in August 2023.
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