I knew that they had redone the entrance to the MGM Grand not too long after it had opened. But I didn’t know why. I just found out why. It’s an interesting story.
Paul Harris, in an article about the Olympics, informed us why.
When the MGM Grand opened in Las Vegas, they used the lion from their famous logo as the entranceway. You would walk through the lion’s mouth to enter the casino from The Strip. After being in business for a few months, management noticed that they weren’t getting as many Asian gamblers as the other casinos nearby. It turned out that, in many Asian cultures, walking into the mouth of a lion was “bad luck,” so they avoided the place like the plague. At a cost of millions, MGM rebuilt the entrance, removing the giant lion mouth. Soon, the MGM had its share of Asian gamblers.