Strip Clubs in Trouble?
Thursday, June 28, 2012 12:00 AM
I have been traveling a lot in the last month handling both family and business matters. At the end of some days, I need to unwind and turn my brain off so I head for a nearby strip club. This is especially the case when I am alone and in a town other than the one in which I live but I go to clubs in my home city of Van Nuys as well.
There have been some nice moments at these clubs but overall they have not been great experiences.
I thought at first it was me and that I had simply been to so many strip clubs in my life than I had gotten bored. I could never get bored of good looking naked women of course. If that ever happens, you could put me in a cemetary plot and start filling it with dirt. I did however think at first that the stress of what I was dealing with was harming my enjoyment of the clubs. Usually a visit to a strip club relieves stress for me and not just because and if I have a good sexual experience. Usually, it is a way of getting away from reality. Inside a strip club there are no windows and usually no clocks and the outside world seems to go away.
At times though that makes my thoughts turn inward and I feel like I am just delaying the solving of the problems instead of doing things to solve them.
I finally decided that that was not why I was not enjoying these clubs as much as I always did. I decided the clubs were different.
I first began to think this in a club in Indianapolis a few weeks ago. A dancer I found mildly attractive was hitting on me to spend $$$$ on private dances with her. That is not new of course but she was relentless. I said no and she would offer something else. Finally, she made me an incredible offer of a lot of sex (the works) for very little money. I would have said yes but there was something creepy about it.
It was an offer any heterosexual male would have grabbed but when I hesitated, she started crying. I heard her say "Jesus Christ, what do I have to do to make some money in this fucking place"?
She was a very attractive woman. She was not the kind of dancer I would have thought would have trouble making some money in that fucking place.
I looked around and I had not noticed before how empty the place was and how the guys who were there were not throwing around money very freely. This was on a Saturday night and if you can't make money in a strip club on Saturday night, you might as well have the women put their clothes on and have them start serving coffee like Starbucks. The girl told me how bad business was for her and I believed her.
She said management had instituted a new split on the money. She had to pay the club a minimum and tip out another minimum fee. That made it possible that she would dance all night and even sell a few privates and not go home with a cent. Under the old system, she split with them so if business was bad, she went home with at least something. In the next few clubs I went to, I made a point of asking the girls about the pay system.
In every single club, they told me it was getting harder to make money. Business was down. Fewer guys were coming in and they were spending less.
In every single club, the management had changed the deal to make sure the club made more and the dancers had to sell harder to make decent money.
I spoke to a friend who is still active in the business. He gave me his take on it.
He said most clubs are in a certain amount of financial trouble. He said the grandfather rule was the only thing stopping a lot of them from closing.
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