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Post-COVID Club Re-Openings: Encouraging Signs

With the COVID-19-prompted, government-mandated closure of many restaurants and entertainment venues, combined with the collapse of business travel from March 2020 through Spring 2021, there was widespread concern that many strip clubs would not survive to re-open. As the pandemic winds down and travel picks up, I decided to do a simple survey of clubs in two key metro areas that followed wildly different COVID-19 responses to see what, if any, signals that they could provide for the US market.

I chose to examine Los Angeles County, California and Harris County, Texas (Houston metro). Los Angeles County was under very strict lockdowns for months. Even when restaurant and entertainment venues were allowed to reopen, numerous limitations on customer capacity, social distancing requirements, mask usage, etc. hindered normal club operations. Only in early June 2021 did the California governor announce the lifting of many of those restrictions. Harris County, Texas took a less draconian path than Los Angeles County. The Houston area saw lockdowns and capacity reductions, but for a much shorter length of time than Los Angeles before largely lifting the government-mandated restrictions.

For my survey, I started with the TUSCL listings by county, sorted by name. From those lists, I selected every 5th club (i.e. 1st, 6th, 11th…) to get a 20% sample of all the clubs identified by TUSCL in each county. If the club identified in the 1-in-5 pattern had last been reviewed prior to June 1, 2019, I skipped it and went to the next club in the TUSCL list that had been reviewed since that date; this was done to avoid potential inaccuracies caused by clubs that closed even before the impacts of COVID-19 were first felt in March 2020.

Twelve clubs were picked from Los Angeles County, CA; ten clubs were picked from Harris County, TX. For each of the 22 clubs picked, I checked for recent TUSCL reviews, social media activity, and/or called the club’s listed phone number to determine if the club was in operation as of Saturday, June 26, 2021. Not unexpectedly, 80% of the picked clubs in Harris County are open. While a 20% closure rate is terrible, it could have been much worse. What was surprising is that the survey found 83% of Los Angeles County clubs had reopened at least for the weekends! The most notable differences between the counties today are 1) two of the Los Angeles County clubs just reopened in June 2021, the county survival rate would have been 67% had this survey been done on May 30th, and 2) the Harris County clubs are operating on a full 6 or 7 days a week schedule while several of the Los Angeles County clubs are only open Thursday through Sunday presently.

The key take-away for the club employees, dancers, and patrons is that the fears of overwhelming club closures have not come to pass in locations which took very different approaches to their COVID-19 responses. While the loss of some clubs was inevitable during the pandemic, and the industry is clearly not “back” nationwide, there is good evidence for optimism going forward.

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