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carlos_spiceyweiner

Ohio

How hard can it be to run a strip club?

On the surface, it seems pretty easy. The basic ingredients are a clean, decent bar and a ready supply of hot women with nice personalities and some skills. Build that club, and guys will come. Keep those customers happy, and there will be lots of money to go around, which means a ready supply of hot dancers who will bring in lots of new customers. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Of course, no business is ever quite that easy. Clubs face constant challenges such as stiff competition, harassment from local authorities and customers/dancers who often get bored and move on to greener pastures. Many clubs do a terrific job and party on for years while lots of others either go down in flames or die slow, painful deaths. These latter clubs I'd like to examine.

Here's my look at a once great club--my first nude club--and its fall from SC heaven to recent closure.

Flashdancers Cabaret was located on the east side of Akron, Ohio, just minutes from downtown and Akron University and near several high traffic streets and a ramp for an always busy Interstate 76. Like other nude Ohio clubs, it once was a bikini bar. Those bars came under near-constant harassment from state liquor control agents who would go in undercover and cite a club if a dancer revealed any part of her body: tits, ass, cooch, pubic hair, etc. It was ridiculous. Clubs got tired of the fines and of having their liquor licenses threatened. Some, like Flashdancers, eventually stopped selling booze and went full nude. The state cops were shut out while the money poured in.

That's how I first discovered Flashdancers in 1995--from a local TV report on how the club was riding a wave of nude club openings statewide. A week later, I paid my first $5 to step inside and for the first time in my life, fell immediately in love.

Flashdancers was fairly large but cozy and comfortable. There was a decent-sized stage, a nice floor area where the dancers performed $5 dances and an elevated VIP area with large leather couches. VIP dances were $15, with hourly specials of three dances for $30. Best of all, the women were phenomenal. Imagine every size, race, type, age of dancer you would ever want in one place. Better still--the club was open at 10 am every day and didn't usually close till 4 am.

For several years I explored every dancer experience possible there, going in at virtually every time of day to find one of my many favorites--hot milfs like Kelly, Emily, Bambi, Brenda and Carina, lovely young girls like Spice, Heather, Cathy and April, hot AA girls and an Asian or two, along with a red hot Nicaraguan named Sachari. The only downside was the money I was spending. But when I worked out how much a steady girlfriend would cost and the emotional/stressful bullshit that came with that, I found Flashdancers offered more bang for the buck. I could get all the fun and "lovin" I wanted and walk away unscathed.

What could go wrong with a place this awesome?

A lot, as it turned out.

Around 1997, the owner announced aggressive plans to expand the business. He was only using one half of his building, so he decided to open the second part as a high-end VIP extension with four-star dining, expensive cigars, champagne, etc. He also planned to build on and add a lingerie store, a sports bar and a dance club. He wanted to turn the joint into a full scale entertainment complex. And why not--the business was flush with cash and the economy was running hot.

A dancer confided something to me that would prove to be prophetic. She said the owner would have been better off spending a fraction of the investment to simply upgrade the existing club--with a larger couch area that could handle the steady stream of lapdance customers, along with a larger parking lot and a little outside security to make the dancers feel safer. Anyhow, the work on the expansion began.

Around this same time, a brand new nude club opened 10 minutes away, in a new building with more space than Flashdancers and a separate non-nude area that served alcohol. As dancers do, many Flashdancer girls decided to give the new place a try. The owner, angered by what he saw as disloyalty, sent out an edict that any dancer who left could never return. That proved to be a disaster since many of the most popular dancers took just that course. Many didn't even like the new club and would simply have returned, but having no recourse took their careers and their customers elsewhere.

Flashdancers was left to chug on without many of its best girls just when it was trying to grow. The bad news eventually got worse. The new business additions soon proved to be abject failures. The VIP section opened for a while but wasn't popular and quickly closed. Construction of the added bars dragged on for what seemed years, eventually stopping and leaving only a large, empty hull never put to any use.

At the same time, whispers of money troubles began circulating at the club. I stopped in one afternoon after returning from a vacation and tried to break some larger bills for tipping. The bartender said she had no cash in her drawer because the owner was constantly coming in to raid the till and deposit whatever he could in the bank.

Then business slowed even further. Fewer customers showed as the number and quality of dancers slipped. At one time, the club brought in popular feature acts on the weekends, but stopped that. More dancers left. Eventually, I stopped coming as often, having found many of my favorites had moved on to another nude club, the Bottom's Up.

One summer soon after, the owner decided to close the club for a couple of months to renovate the interior in hopes of restoring some lost business. This proved to be a crushing blow since the time off killed whatever remaining business Flashdancers had earned.

When Flashdancers reopened, it was nothing but a shadow of its former self. There were few dancers, and even fewer customers . The owner took some steps to bring business back. He hired an entertainment management "expert" who brought in new, young dancers and began marketing club. That experiment soon ended, and the new talent fled.

Still, the club lingered on for nearly a decade, languishing even further as new, higher end clubs opened to siphon even more of its business. Then a number of nearby dive clubs opened and began providing the hot action and selection of dancers that once made Flashdancers famous. There was just no reason for customers to visit a near-dead club.

Even with its renovations, Flashdancers fell into disrepair. Customers paid $7 to walk into a dirty bar that wreaked of piss, set a two drink minimum ($5 canned soft drinks and bottled water were the only choices) and usually was manned, even on weekend nights, by no more than three dancers who were almost always older and overweight.

Every once in a while I'd get bored and stop by, only to sit even more bored and watch customers walk in, look around and quickly leave. One of my ATF's did return, but left soon after, telling me that something "odd" was happening and she was done with the place. During my final visit, I noticed some of the dancers were no longer wearing high heels and instead performed in flip flops. They even refused to take off their bottoms for the "nude" lapdances. I guess they had given up as well.

As 2013 closed, that was it for Flashdancers. The owner shuttered the doors, and within months the club was torn down, leaving little more than great old memories (for me) and years of wasted potential.

Flashdancers' slow, decade-long crawl to the grave also left me with a lot of questions. Why couldn't the club be saved? What steps should the business have taken to bring in new talent that would surely attract customers back? Why not, for example, hire a bunch of hot girls and pay them hourly until customers rediscovered the club?

Here's an even bigger question: How did the club even stay open for years when it never seemed to have any business and was the joke of the mongering community?

Maybe I'm just being sentimental. Maybe another article on extras or dancers would be more popular. I think a lot of us spend some time putting our business brains on clubs and wonder if we could run them better.

What are your suggestions? How would you save a failing club and what would you want to tell club owners? Club owners, maybe you should spend some time listening to your customers.