“Not a lot goes on in the half hour or hour before a race meeting, so it was as much a practical decision as anything,” MRC Executive Director, Racing and Operations Jake Norton said.
“It is an attempt to be more efficient.”
The Melbourne Racing Club owns and operates the Caulfield, Sandown and Mornington tracks.
Recently the club announced that to cut costs by becoming more efficient they wouldn’t open the front gates at the track until about half hour before the first race.
Becoming more efficient means reducing the wage bill.
The idea was that if they save half an hour’s pay they’d be humming.
Someone forgot that on big days people like to get to the races early.
There people are hungry and thirsty, so they spend money getting on the piss and scoffing food.
Good business sense says come in folks, let’s get going.
Bad business sense says I couldn’t care about the customers, the half-pied accounts are more important.
Sound familiar?
Didn’t the soon to be sacked Racing Victoria CEO Andy ‘Big Bash’ Jones say something similar the other day.
People don’t like waiting around to pay exorbitant entry fees to a race track so that they can pay overs for food and drink all day.
They don’t like being taken for suckers and fools either.
This picture at the top was the queue of paying punters outside Caulfield about an hour before the 1st race yesterday.
The Melbourne Racing wouldn’t let them in.
It’s all about efficiency you see.
By the time they did let them in the queues had swelled, so it look a whole lot longer to get people through the gates than it would have if they hadn’t become efficient.
Go figure.
Every minute lost was a dollar not spent.
That was clever wasn’t it?
These Melbourne racing bosses are all clowns.
Peter V’Landys doesn’t even worry about fighting them anymore.
The war has been won, and the whole world knows who won it.
Why laugh at these fools when everyone else is doing it for you?
Thank God for PVL and the Everest.
I bet you the gates are open early at Randwick.
Sydneysiders have some sense.
Thank God someone does.