From Craps to Cranberry Juice

Some 2,400 of the faithful--at 50 bucks a head--have crammed into the darkened, cavernous room at the Las Vegas Hilton. Spotlights illuminate a polished emcee as he pumps up the throng; overhead lights dance on a curtain behind him, creating the illusion of deep-space stars and celestial rings in reds, blues, yellows and greens. The spectacle literally erupts as confetti-filled cannons explode and pyrotechnics shower the stage. * This extravaganza is called Preview ‘97, but it’s not the debut of Sin City’s newest illusionists or nudes on ice. Rather, it is a production of the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce, celebrating with vintage Strip showmanship the seemingly oh-so-bright future of the booming region. And why not confetti and fireworks? Last year, about 30 million people came here under no duress to empty their wallets--including $6 billion on gambling alone. And thousands more move here every month, either to retire or work. As master-planned neighborhoods spread across the valley, nearby gypsum miners rush to fill the demand for plasterboard. With the facts to back it up, everyone rightfully proclaims that Las Vegas is on a roll. * So, we can indulge local business leaders for their annual exercise in hyperbolic self-congratulation, for staging what amounts to a glitzy infomercial, a sort of “Las Vegas: This Is Your Life!” But as the afternoon wears on and the parade of boosters continues, one speaker--an out-of-town management consultant--refers to “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” advising the city that it’s time to make some decisions. * “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” he quotes Alice beseeching the Cheshire Cat. * “That depends a good deal,” the Cat responds, “on where you want to get to.” * And that’s just the point. The keepers of this city, as curious as any Wonderland, are searching for direction, asking what the city wants to be when it grows up. And wondering: What are the odds?

*

Jan Laverty Jones is mayor of Las Vegas, and while her kingdom does not extend to the Strip--that greenback gravy train is in unincorporated Clark County--she unabashedly postures herself as the region’s conscience. Jones, 47, wouldn’t mind running the whole state; in 1994, she tried (and failed) to unseat Nevada Gov. Bob Miller in the Democratic primary. Local voters still embrace her, though, returning her to a 10th-floor corner office atop City Hall for a second term in 1995. Through glass picture windows, she looks down on the Lady Luck casino and, almost as far as the eye can see, sprawling suburbs.

Because she’s such an enthusiastic, attractive and fit woman, you want to toss her pompoms and watch her run through a cheer-leading routine: Go, Vegas, GO! Old-timers remember her as a born promoter, beaming on television, pitching for the local Fletcher Jones automotive dealerships; an upbeat huckster who didn’t mind posing alongside a female impersonator if it helped sell a car.

But these days, Jones is not all giggles and grins. She wonders whether people will find Las Vegas--the reincarnation of an Old West boomtown, with the nation’s fastest metropolitan growth rate and 1.1 million residents--an attractive place to live and raise families 10, 15, 30 years from now.

“We have to quit focusing on what we do well--we do resorts well--and focus on what we don’t do well: the quality of life and developing a city that is more than life-support for gaming,” she says.

For years, civic leaders celebrated the spoils of gambling for prompting the snowball of growth. But it has turned into an avalanche, overrunning the city’s ability to keep pace. By at least one measure, the burgeoning population isn’t paying for itself: A 1991 study revealed that sales and property taxes paid by a new household totaled about $1,000 a year, while public expenditures associated with that household were about $6,500. It seems that Las Vegas, built with out-of-town money, is short-changing itself. And, Jones says, local governments need $10 billion just to catch up.

The school district must open, on average, a new campus every month to accommodate the influx of children. The water district requires more pipelines to deliver water from Lake Mead to thirsty new neighborhoods. Vacationers have turned little McCarran International Airport into the nation’s 10th busiest, and it must expand even more. Motorists cry for new expressways around Las Vegas--and a monorail along the Strip--to ease congestion. And federal highway, airport and water funds are jeopardized because of worsening air quality, evidenced by a ground-hugging band of ocher beneath a brilliant blue sky.

Only by addressing these problems, the mayor insists, can the city diversify and nourish its young soul.

Jones loves Minneapolis. Great little city, she says. Its downtown is thriving with a diversified mix of professional business, retail stores, culture and residences. “What Las Vegas lacks,” she says, “is that sort of ephemeral element of a big city and a diversified business base. Telling people that we’re a great place to live doesn’t make it so. I’d like to be a city like Minneapolis, where you have major sporting, theater, opera.”

Jones exaggerates to make her point: “All we can do here is go to dinner. And we can go bowling.”

She is perplexed that city officials, state politicians, county commissioners, university administrators, gaming executives and business development leaders have not huddled as a working group, shirt-sleeves rolled up, to focus on Las Vegas’ future. “Everybody needs to be working in unison, but right now you’ve got a lot of different concerned groups working at cross-purposes,” Jones says.

Carol Harter, president of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, echoes the need for such a group. “There has been a lot of discussion about it. I keep hearing it. But I don’t know who’s going to take the ball and run with it.”

Yvonne Atkinson Gates, chairwoman of the Clark County Board of Commissioners, says that she participated in a retreat 18 months ago where everyone agreed to discuss the region’s deteriorating quality of life. “But it became a back-burner item afterward. I don’t think people were ready to deal with it.”

Little wonder, says Jones sarcastically: “Everybody’s busy. Life is good.”

*

Life is good for Steve Wynn. he’s busy building his fourth resort hotel in town, the billion-dollar Bellagio, Wonderland’s ultimate destination. Wynn, 55, doesn’t share Jones’ sweeping view of the city; he commands his Mirage Resorts from a first-floor corner office at his flagship hotel, behind a decorative wall that shields him from tourists. Yet Wynn is widely anointed as the most visionary business person in Las Vegas. He ushered in the generation of themed mega-resorts, his fiery volcano (Mirage) and battling pirates (Treasure Island) redefining storefronts along a street that now boasts Luxor’s pyramid, New York-New York’s skyline, Excalibur’s medieval castle and MGM Grand’s huge golden lion.

But even Wynn ponders the repercussions of this unfettered growth, promoted in part by his own imagination and construction. At Preview ‘97, he quieted the crowd with a reality check: Is quantity coming at the expense of quality? Is bigger necessarily better? Where, he wondered, is this town headed?

While he agrees that Las Vegas would benefit by diversifying, his view isn’t completely altruistic. The corporations that feed the state with nearly half its revenue, through gaming taxes, remain popular targets to be tapped still more. A broader business base could make that less of a threat.

But expanding that base isn’t easy. Las Vegas, he says, suffers from the perception that while it’s a great place to visit, it might not be considered a great place to settle.

“The image of the town as a recreational place is at odds with a lot of corporations who say, ‘Well, I don’t want my employees distracted. Here’s a town that is dedicated to distractions 24 hours a day,’ ” Wynn says. “Well, we have to work with what we’ve got. What are we going to do, hide the casinos? If someone comes to town, we’re going to throw a cloth over the Mirage?” He laughs at the notion, then raises his voice and says proudly, defiantly: “We are what we are!”

And that isn’t necessarily bad, he figures. Hotel-casinos employ one of every four people in the work force and, popular myth notwithstanding that gaming is a neon front for the minimum-wage hospitality industry, those employees earn an average, including tips, of $25,000 a year. At Treasure Island, about 47% of its 4,800 employees earn between $25,000 and $44,999 a year; 4.3% make $45,000 or more a year. Nearly 31% earn between $20,000 and $24,999 a year, and fewer than 18% earn less than $20,000 a year--a group that includes part-time clerks, retail cashiers and game arcade attendants. While Californians may turn up their noses at such wages, living is cheaper in Las Vegas. According to the American Chamber of Commerce Researchers Assn., the overall cost of living in Las Vegas is 15% below that of Los Angeles, and average housing prices are at least one-quarter less.

Another 10% of the Las Vegas work force labors in construction, most either building still more hotels and casinos or new homes. No other U.S. city can claim such figures, and because construction is an early indicator of a region’s future economic growth, the gaming industry gladly takes credit for that, too.

The resorts themselves are diversifying beyond gaming. At Treasure Island, less than half of its total revenue is generated from the casino as corporate strategists target a new and growing breed of Vegas vacationers for whom gambling fills a smaller part of the itinerary. Full-price hotel rooms, fine restaurants, upscale retail stores and pricey entertainment are the emerging profit centers within the industry.

Wynn has harped that the resorts must deliver on their promise, that the joints must match, on the inside, the tease they project outside. Likewise, he says, as Las Vegas presents itself as a host to corporate America, it too has to be able to deliver on the tease.

The question is whether, like some aging showgirl in stage makeup, Las Vegas looks that good upon closer inspection.

*

Selling a city that profits on both deception and perception as a serious place to do business can be tricky. Corporate relocation consultants say Las Vegas’ biggest obstacle is what built the region in the first place: gaming.

Some say a stigma is still attached to gambling--even though Las Vegas is home to more than 90,000 Mormons and despite the fact that Southern Baptists held a convention here. Gambling is also blamed--or credited--for inflating salaries, in particular because of the substantial tip income earned by many employees.

The casinos exact a toll on smaller companies whose employees are lured away for better pay or improved chances of career advancement. “Every time a large hotel opens up with 3,000 rooms and needs 5,000 employees, there’s a shift of employees in town,” says Andy Nazarechuk, director of the Hospitality Research and Development Center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Last year alone, four major new hotel-casinos opened: Monte Carlo, Orleans, New York-New York and the Stratosphere, a make-over of the old Vegas World. And a mind-boggling $6 billion in Strip construction is planned during the next three years: Luxor and Caesars Palace are expanding, and targeted for 1998 openings are Wynn’s 3,000-room Bellagio, a new, 4,000-room Circus Circus resort and Hilton’s 2,900-room Paris. Hoping for 1999 openings: a 3,200-room Planet Hollywood and the biggest hotel in the universe, a 6,000-room, Venetian-themed hotel by businessman Sheldon Adelson to replace his old Sands hotel.

With jobs ranging from $9-an-hour maids, ticket-office cashiers, dishwashers and accounting clerks to $19-an-hour maintenance engineers and $30-an-hour casino shift managers, “gaming’s liability is that it competes for the best-quality labor,” says corporate relocation consultant Dennis Donovan of the Wadley-Donovan Group in Morristown, N.J. Still, the percentage of casino employees in the entire labor force has dropped slightly in recent years. Construction jobs soared 21.4% last year and manufacturing jobs climbed 5.5%, each dramatically eclipsing U.S. averages. The region’s unemployment rate is below the national average, and the overall job-growth rate in 1996 was 8.6%, the nation’s hottest. According to Mike Clarke, a state economist, that pace should continue for at least two more years. (California’s 1996 job-growth rate, in contrast, was 2.7%.)

Despite the seeming availability of jobs that continues to attract new residents (6,000 to 7,000 each month), many employers fret over the quality of the somewhat transient labor pool.

When Terry O’Neal supervised the opening of Global Discount Travel Services in 1995, “I thought one of the advantages would be the large labor pool--especially due to people having worked hotel and showroom reservation desks. But we were initially disappointed by the skill level. I spent more time training employees here than I’ve had to in other cities.” Compounding his frustrations: “There are so many jobs available here, if you counsel an individual about his work, he’ll simply move elsewhere to another job.”

Such thoughts become litany. When Tom Powers oversaw a branch office of a San Diego-based mortgage company, he says he looked for a qualified residential loan officer for more than three months. He spent two months recruiting a qualified secretary/receptionist and says: “She could have put herself up in a bidding war.” Denine David has searched six months for a bilingual secretary for her boss, an attorney. Richard Bowler’s CPA firm has scoured the town for seven months for a qualified computer network engineer familiar with financial-application software. Eldon Armstrong, who builds custom computers, interviewed 200 people before he finally hired two--and they still required training. Doug Sartain, who can’t find a qualified fire sprinkler and alarm system technician for his company, describes himself as “truly a desperate man.”

And Larry J. Freeman, who moved his cosmetic company’s production line from Long Beach to Las Vegas, retreated to Compton two years later. “The labor market was very weak,” he says. “The better employees are lined up to go into the gaming business.”

Even recruiters searching beyond Las Vegas to fill top positions can find it equally difficult. Head-hunter Bob Allen courted a job prospect from Ohio, but couldn’t win over the man’s wife. “She was concerned that the schools were overcrowded. And she said one of her girls played the oboe, and we don’t know what an oboe is.”

Donovan says that Las Vegas doesn’t spend enough money promoting itself as a business location: “We still have to convince a lot of our clients that Las Vegas is a good place to work and live. They say, ‘It’s a great place to have fun, but is there enough of a work culture there?’ ”

*

In at least one area, however, Las Vegas has made some progress. Thirteen years ago, Citibank opened a 24-hour facility to process credit card billings, make credit cards and handle customer telephone inquiries. Citibank sought workers in a town already steeped in customer relations and round-the-clock employment culture, and now has 1,666 of them. Citibank, however, chose as its mailing address an upscale neighborhood on the city’s western fringe, The Lakes. (After all, who would want to send their money to Las Vegas with no chance of hitting a jackpot?) In Citibank’s wake, a handful of other banking institutions--including Household Credit, Bank of America and GE Capital--shifted so-called “back-office” operations to Las Vegas.

The promise of a large employee pool prompted other companies to relocate here as well. Softbank Services Group, which handles telephone sales and 24-hour computer technical support to people who buy hardware and software products from among 70 Softbank clients, opened here last fall and expects to employ 600 people by summer. And rather than expand in California, Williams-Sonoma, the San Francisco-based catalog house, came last summer to increase its sales and customer service support group with several hundred new phone workers.

Companies also embrace Nevada’s anti-tax fervor; the state does not levy a corporate or personal income tax, among others. And with no inventory tax and cheap, abundant outbound trucking (the thousands of semis supplying casinos and construction projects don’t want to leave town empty), the region proves popular for warehouse and distribution operations.

Ocean Spray Cranberries operates a regional bottling plant and distribution center in nearby Henderson, easily filling 130 jobs from among 5,000 applicants; Levi-Strauss opened--and is expanding--a regional distribution center that employs 400 people.

Such diversification leaves civic leaders breathless. When Levi-Strauss arrived, “you would have thought the Hoover Dam was being built again,” quips Wynn. “The party they threw was so disproportionate to the amount of people hired, but everybody was so happy. And the rolling thunder that accompanied the arrival of Citibank--oh, my God, it was like, hallelujah!”

*

It’s 2 in the morning in a city that doesn’t sleep, and while some woman from Kansas is working the slots at the Desert Inn, hoping her quarter will buy at least three cherries, Jim Brennan is seven miles across town working in a different fruit industry. He’s loading cases of Ocean Spray Cranberry drinks into the back of an 18-wheeler destined for Phoenix.

Brennan used to work in a casino--after he left the Air Force, he enrolled in a local dealer school and landed a job at a “break-in house,” a smaller downtown casino that hires neophytes. “I got tired of putting up with all the drunks, standing on my feet all night and making just four and a quarter an hour plus maybe 25 bucks a night in tips. So you’re talking $60 a night. Sure, you might make $200 a night at Caesars, but it might take seven to 10 years to get there.” Disillusioned, he opted for the $30,000-a-year job at Ocean Spray.

But hotel-casino jobs--especially ones that generate tips--remain enticing, especially among younger people and those lacking other marketable skills. Educators bemoan that too many young adults are postponing--or giving up altogether--higher education because of easy-to-find jobs. Statewide, only 38% of high school graduates advance to college--the second-worst matriculation rate in the nation--and Las Vegas’ high school-to-college dropout rate is Nevada’s worst. Sighs Brian Cram, Clark County School District superintendent: “Gaming is our steel mill.”

And it’s easier money. The Las Vegas Review-Journal occasionally runs an information box on appropriate levels of tipping. A young woman clearing tables at one Strip resort coffee shop says that with tips, she averages $13 an hour during her graveyard shift; the valet out front says he earns $40,000 a year parking cars, while attending UNLV part time.

Two blocks off the Strip, at a quiet business hotel called Alexis Park--no slots, no keno runners, no felt-covered tables--Stephanie Pagoto is tending bar. She’s a whirlwind, mixing drinks, opening beer bottles and pouring wine, all the while carrying on multiple conversations with customers, some of them regulars she knows by name.

These businessmen on expense accounts show their appreciation with tips, and she says she made nearly $50,000 last year. Pagoto dropped out of college a semester short of earning a hotel management degree from UNLV. “When cocktail waitresses and people like me can make more money than their bosses, what’s the use in having a degree?” she asks.

Instructors at UNLV’s hotel management school say they admonish students to not forsake professional hotel careers for tip jobs. “But if a student is trying to pay his bills and can make $100 a night, well, that’s more money than he’s seen in his entire life,” Nazarechuk of UNLV says. “We try to talk to them about where they want to be in 10 years.”

It doesn’t help that the region is hobbled, in part, by what some perceive as a weak higher education system. “We have just one university and one community college,” notes Jay Kornmayer, a senior vice president for Wells Fargo Bank who has spent the past 23 years nurturing development in Nevada. “If a high-tech company needs significant ongoing education, we’re somewhat at a disadvantage.” Even the mayor worries about how UNLV is not meeting local professional needs, and says her teen-age daughter will attend an out-of-state university.

Such criticism weighs heavily on university president Harter, who has been on the job less than two years. She says UNLV must better promote itself and seize a more forceful role in developing the area’s economic diversity.

There have been missed opportunities. Last year, a Taiwanese electronics firm looking to relocate dismissed Las Vegas because it wasn’t convinced the region could offer the kind of academic support it could tap in the Silicon Valley. “Well, the great irony of that is, no one from the university was asked to meet with these people,” Harter says. “It was telling to me that we didn’t even know they were in town, or that whoever was sponsoring their visit didn’t think we needed to be involved in that discussion.”

Terry Wright, president of Nevada Title and chairman of the board of the Nevada Development Authority, says he doesn’t know who dropped the ball on that. “We tell the university, ‘Listen, we want you to respond to our business community needs,’ ” he says. But comparing UNLV’s relative youth to the area’s explosive growth, “the university will be playing catch-up for the next 50 years, I suspect.”

LAS VEGAS: DESTINATION unknown.

Gambling and its euphemism, “entertainment,” will remain the city’s white-hot, ever-expanding core. Bill Thompson, a UNLV professor and expert on the future of gambling, predicts 10% annual growth in the casino business for at least 15 more years, nourished in part by the nationwide spread of gaming.

Beyond gaming, however, the compass for development points in almost every direction in Wonderland.

“I haven’t heard of anyone focusing on a theme for Las Vegas development--nor even the need for one,” says Mark Brown, vice president of the Howard Hughes Corp. His company has quit its once-legendary hotel-casino business in favor of pursuing the newest cash cow, commercial and residential development.

Las Vegas, it seems, has more options than a craps table. Civic leaders are trying to recruit Hollywood and permanent back-lot production studios. Las Vegas is popular for location shooting, and the town already is stocked with costume designers, makeup artists, set builders and special-effects technicians.

The nearby Nevada Test Site, no longer a place of underground atomic explosions, may be converted in part to a commercial space port from which to launch reusable rockets. Others envision it as a private, high-tech research, development and testing site for hydrogen fuel and solar energy. At the least, test site privatization will help Las Vegas recapture an upscale science community, its promoters claim.

Developers are planning a domed, 110,000-seat stadium and adjoining convention center near downtown. Private funding has been secured, luxury boxes have been priced and promoters have launched a tenant search. Jones says the stadium will provide the catalyst for additional downtown development, with the kind of business and cultural arts that can be found in her beloved Minneapolis.

And what of ideas that aren’t even on the drawing board yet? With the number of retirees (about one-third of the local population is 55 or older), might Las Vegas someday become a medical research center? And can Las Vegas parlay its synergism as the nation’s No. 1 convention and vacation destination by enticing major entertainment parks, a la Orlando?

But for any of this to happen, Las Vegas--home of expensive and lavish productions--must get its larger act together.

*

So far, it hasn’t. Mayor Jones says her valley has grown so rapidly, “it’s been management by crisis, rather than management by vision.” Even when civic leaders have the chance to collectively address the challenges to the city’s future, they often duck. Absent among the speakers at Preview ‘97, for instance, was a representative of the bloated Clark County School District, which is swelling by more than 12,000 students a year and, with 9,000 teachers (average salary: $37,800), is the state’s largest employer. Twice in the past four years, the district sought (and won) voter approval for a total $1.2 billion in construction bonds. The state does not contribute to school construction, and politicians will not ask home-builders for impact fees--for fear it will chill the growth most everyone still embraces.

Nor did a representative of the Las Vegas Valley Water District address the conference, even as the district struggles to keep pace with the region’s growing water needs. It must negotiate for more Colorado River water because Nevada’s share, established decades ago, has proved woefully inadequate. Residential neighborhoods guzzle about two-thirds of the water, while the hotels consume only 8% of it. Yet it was the mega-resorts on the Strip that contributed $400,000 toward a recent water-conservation campaign. “Gaming is the best friend we’ve got,” says Patricia Mulroy, the district’s general manager.

Jones wants the Nevada Legislature and local gaming executives to help tackle the quality-of-life challenges. But, she acknowledges, state politicians wrestle with north-south allegiances, much as in California, and casino executives face full plates.

J. Terrence Lanni, chairman and CEO of MGM Grand, agrees: “We’re all so busy, we’re not focusing on the city’s long-term needs, and I don’t know who is. The growth has been so dynamic in the past five or six years, we haven’t had a chance to pause and look beyond the present.”

But the reality is setting in. Last month, gaming leaders proposed increasing the room tax to 9% from 8% to help pay for infrastructure improvements.

Wynn thinks more movers and shakers are now pausing and reflecting: “People are definitely deciding to reexamine where we’re going. This breakneck growth has gone on longer than anyone dreamed, and everybody was willing to pooh-pooh it for a few years. What’s new now is that a guy like me opens his yap--that a company, an institution that has always pounded the table for growth, is now questioning it. It’s very hard to escape the obvious, that the valley has limitations on what it can hold. And we can’t expect economic diversification if we destroy the quality of life here.”

He talks hypothetically of recruiting companies to move here and why they might reject Las Vegas. “Maybe it’s the schools. Or whack, the road system knocked us out. Or whack, maybe it’s gaming itself, which is an unresolvable conflict. I know one thing: If this valley is not a good place to live and bring children, they will not come.”

*

While Las Vegas grapples with becoming more livable, it can’t expect much help from the state. Gov. Bob Miller--whose office was also absent from the Preview ’97 stage--takes a hands-off approach to local problems. He says the Legislature is unlikely to send state funds south--even if it had the money--to help the region’s stretched public works.

“As one legislator said to me, when he starts making the zoning decisions for Las Vegas, he’ll start raising the taxes,” Miller says. “The reality is, local government decisions require not just accepting growth, but accepting the responsibility to pay for it. To suggest that the Legislature pass a tax, instead of a local government, would be a cop-out. If they’re going to decide how to have growth occur, they need the backbone to make the decisions on how to generate the revenue [to pay for it].”

Local jurisdictions can increase taxes or assess impact fees on developers only with the Legislature’s blessing. Aside from seeking permission to levy a local quarter-cent sales tax to help pay for nearly $2 billion in new water works, Las Vegas officials have not yet forwarded formal requests to raise additional revenues. When one is presented, reaction in Carson City--where the Legislature is currently in its biennial session--will be cautious. “If a legislator voted for enabling [tax] legislation, he wouldn’t be able to fool anybody in Clark County when he went back to the voters,” surmises one state official. “He could be blamed for those taxes. You won’t get Assemblyman X walking the plank on taxes unless he believes County Commissioner Y and City Councilman Z will also walk the plank with him.”

County Commissioner Bruce Woodbury suggests he’s willing to walk that plank: “We’d be happy to tackle our problems, but they [the legislators] have to give us the ability to do it.”

The Nevada populace would just as soon raise taxes--as long as they are not personally targeted. In a poll released in January by University of Nevada researchers in Reno and Las Vegas, 69% of the respondents favored an increase in gaming taxes, 68% supported an increase in cigarette and liquor taxes and 61% said the time had finally come to tax corporate profits.

Says Jones: “The question to this Legislature is: Either take a tough stand and come up with some funding alternatives for us or hand it back to us and see what kind of mettle our local elected officials have. It’s going to take balls. People in politics aren’t known to be willing to stand up and say, ‘This is what it’s going to take.’

“I believe we have a five-year window of opportunity to make some hard decisions. If we’re still talking about this three years from now, I don’t know what Las Vegas will look like, and I’m not sure I’d want to live here. But if we do move forward with hard decisions, we have the capability of becoming a world-class city.”

Just move forward, Jones emphasizes. Pick a direction and move forward.

*

And so the cheshire Cat asks Alice where she wants to get.

“I don’t much care where--” she says.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” interrupts the Cat.

“--so long as I get somewhere,” Alice explains.