For weeks I’d been hearing that the axe was about to fall at Harrah’s corporate headquarters. As you probably know, the blow landed on Friday. The company’s spokespeople were all incommunicado today (likely bracing themselves for the big ’supercasino’ announcement in Britain), so exactly who got the chop is rather vague.

Scuttlebutt, however, is that Harrah’s in-house media-production studio was shuttered and 90 percent of the corporate-level development staff was let go, as well, implying that construction projects (like the proposed pedestrian bridge in front of Paris-Las Vegas) will devolve to the individual-property level. If true, that would be quite a reversal for Harrah’s, a company so centralized I once it heard it described as being "run off a spreadsheet in [CEO] Gary Loveman’s office."

Harrah’s may have pulled the trigger on those layoffs too soon. From what I hear, some of the departed employees had to be entreated back for one more week of work. The severance package is a matter of deep secrecy, although the Review-Journal’s Howard Stutz reports that it included a thank-you letter from Loveman. With poker-faced irony, Stutz notes that Loveman wrote that "the employees being eliminated had contributed greatly to the company’s success over the past few years." That’s probably an easy sentiment to dispense if your name is Gary Loveman and you’re the only Harrah’s employee publicly guaranteed to still have a job when the Texas Pacific-Apollo Management takeover goes through.

What is too quick to get lost when "efficiencies" are being created and Wall Street is jabbering that profits aren’t big enough (Big enough for what, might one ask?) is that real people’s lives are getting knocked over like skittles. I mean, it takes some brass to send Senior VP of Communications & Government Relations Jan Jones out to paint a smiley face on the situation when some of her own departmental employees were among those getting the sack. But, as they would say in The Godfather, "this isn’t personal. It’s business."