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Four months after the Sahara’s final day of operation, the last remnants of the Rat Pack-era casino are gone. A liquidation sale to empty the 59-year-old resort has ended.
“We gave the keys back, and now they’re going to do whatever they do,” liquidation company President Donald Hayes said of SBE Entertainment, the Sahara’s owner.
SBE CEO Sam Nazarian hasn’t unveiled plans for the closed resort. The most he’s offered is the hope of reopening it with “a complete renovation and repositioning.”
The sale at the Sahara lasted more than two months and was the largest liquidation sale in Las Vegas history, according to Hayes. His company, National Content Liquidators, ran similar sell-offs when the Dunes, Landmark, Aladdin and MGM Marina closed.
The latest purge included every item from the Sahara’s 1,720 guest rooms and 85,000-square-foot casino floor, arcade, kitchens, restaurants and shops — more than 600,000 items in all. “We had products until the last day,” Hayes said.
He declined to say how much revenue the sale produced.
By last week, beds, dressers, lamps and pictures were selling for $1 to $5, a deep discount from their original triple-digit price tags. Whatever didn’t sell was donated.
Collector items such as the hotel’s 700 camel lamps went fast and were gone after the first weekend. More generic goods — dishes, furniture, linens — took longer to clear out.
The thousands of buyers who showed up were as varied as the items up for grabs. Hotel, casino and restaurant owners took advantage of the resort sale to stock their businesses. Speculators gathered goods in the hopes of one day making a buck on eBay. A few people bought items to transform portions of their homes into themed “Sahara rooms.”
“Everything and anything that had ‘Sahara’ on it was popular,” Hayes said. “It didn’t matter if it was a deck of cards or a cup.”