Strip business in decline - the anecdotal evidence
I've have many other indicators, but here I want to comment on strictly anecdotal evidence on ATFs that I know, with #4 (below) being a bellweather or sorts which could well indicate that the strip business is getting hit hard, or soon will beListed are 4 AFTs of varying levels, the later 2 being very significant with ongoing constant contact and interaction with me of some type, the first 2 far more casual and less frequent.
1. low 20's, long legged beauty, a bit ditzy at times but Ok in general (fully american but latin origin) - used to throwing money around, but no business way way off, however is expanding her whoring side-business - so she's doing OK recently when I last talked with her several weeks back
2. 30's dancer, very pretty petite woman (latin, in USA 8 yrs) nice person, very diligent and serious about business, great personality, english better than average, dooesn't talk about business much, impression is its slow, not sure one way or the other
3. 30's (foreign origin came as a child to america) (highest top shelf looks) shy, very feminine, super nice personality - good dancer, very natural and super exotic and puts alot into dances, currently has very serious financial problems due to downturn in business, she is the main income for family and low-earning boyfriend. This dancer never asks guys for dances, and now for the first time in a multi-year career is starting to do this, and its helping a bit, but not enough, but she has a very large extended family in america to keep her from going under financially
4. 30's, very attractive girl, (Latin) (in USA only a few years) has brother here (one she lives with and is now layed off in construction business), a large amount of her earnings at one point (when she was earning big money last year and earlier this yr) were being sent back to her country of origin to help her mother and her child. This dancer is exceptionally capable and self sufficient, is an extraordinarily sensual and energic dancer, and is an expert on the the "wanna dance" solicitation method, and she knows exactly how to approach patrons and what do say in her very sexy accent, and will ask 50 guys a shift to dance and won't be bothered by rejection. I've known this dancer for most of this year and she lives very frugally, experienced poverty as a child and she's never once mentioned bills, but she's (for the first time ever) now bringing up issue (during a normally strong pre-holiday Christmas season)as to whether she can successfully pay her upcoming rent bill, so she's telling me about double-shifting ahead of the end of the month to leave a cushion. I was in the club with her today, and there was a huge afternoon crowd, but out of 100 plus guys, probably only about 5 or 6 in the 2 hours I was there, were buying any dances, and there were lots of pretty girls in the club at the time
Ok maybe it Holiday special SS edition, that might be part of it, however I think its a strong indicator - that with a dancer with this kind of talent for the business having problems - that the strip business in this locale (northeast USA) is in free fall, apparently because of discretionary cash drying up or something else happening in the economy
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I was at the club last Friday night and the place was dead for a Friday. Not only a slim crowd for a Friday night, but the place lacked energy. No excitement. I made a comment to one of the veteran dancers that although the new girls here are OK, they really are not dancer material. I think the lure of "easy money" has enticed too many women into the business that are not really hot enough to be strippers and it has taken the toll with customers. They are tired of going into a strip club and seeing a certain percentage of dancers as "just ordinary". Don't get me wrong, there are still plenty of hotties, but I think the market has been flooded with too many average-looking dancers.
I cannot figured out whether BECAUSE of the slowdown, this problem is getting worse, or will eventually have the opposite effect down the road, as the less attractive girls are forced out of the business, and prettier girls (lacking opportunity elsewhere in the economy) enter the business
Of course my impression is the business itself for years has been staffed by a core group of girls in the 7 or 8 range -which by analysis would typically lets say be the pretty and cute (and perhaps personable girl from high school,) but one who would never win any major beauty contests. One in public that the average guy might notice, but he's not going to spin his head for
However I have to agree, not only are there girls that shouldn't be dancing, there are now a distinct lack of 9 and higher level girls
Yesterday in Club A there was quite a selection of dancers in the 6 to 8 range, with the ATF I was on the looks scale objectively an 8.5 range dancer (subjectively in an attrativeness scale with the accent and down to earth personality higher in my mind). Now with 20 girls working the floor and maybe 50 to 60 guys at that point with the club rapidly getting busier, my ATF had only managed one set (3) dances with one customer in 1.5 hours, and she was standing alone when I came in - having (as she always does)already worked the entire room
Now there were at least two 10 range girls in the room
The first has been "working" (she lounges in the corner most of the time) there 2 or 3 days a week for several years and was waiting for one of her HIGH ROLLER regulars, and that's 90% of entire business - just handling several deep pocket (RIL's I would guess) customers a week, so as usual she wasn't out asking for dances
The second girl, a stunning/head spinning model-like brunette (with augmentation) who flies in from another city 1500 miles away only hits the club once a month and when I was with her in VIP early last summer she(ludicrously) claimed to be routinely pulling in $3000 a night - yesterday I saw her unable to get a single dance in the 20 minutes I saw her working the floor. Saw her on stage for the first time, and she absolutely first rate. My impression is that she's a high level escort of some type, and she does the once-a-month thing to among other things dig up new clients. She happens to work at least part-time with a law firm, so my dance last summer ended up basically just talk
Club A yesterday had customers, just few spending, however I have to agree why should guys go to a club, if the girls are mostly just regular girls? They need more high level girls to draw people to the clubs, something out of the ordinary
The ATF at one point, (both of us looking at all these guys standing around with doing nothing but watching the stage) says to another dancer (from her same country) something in her native language; then she interprets it for me
Dancer "I just said, I hope they all get drunk so they will finally buy some dances"
Note only a small percentage of girls (as far as I know) in most clubs can stomach that much rejection at one time, but I guess being a 10 and knowing it (very different from an AFT 10 level I know from another club) - is how she handles it. My guess is also that the super large money offsets any issues she might have with that
Now of course as I just mentioned my ATF in Club A does the same thing, goes up to any guys to ask for a dance with no pre-sorting, and she was suggesting or inferring to me that she believed this 10 level girl had some special deal with the manager or owner that allowed her to parachute in like this to the club. This is probably more evidence that this 10 dancer is mixing stripping and high level escorting, maybe including some manager/owner escorting
However I was wondering the other day, I wonder how many dancers got those adjustable rate mortgages and are in danger of losing their homes when rates readjust upwards. I heard some people will have to pay 1,500 more per month for their large homes in many parts of the country. A dancer would have to work a lot more to pay that. Maybe not in some places but around here I think so.
Maybe customers aren't spending as much in the strip clubs and I just don't know. I heard discretionary spending on food and energy is taking a much bigger bite out of everyone's pocket.
What's being hit first per the economists is discretionary luxury type spending mostly be middle and upper middle class - for example elective plastis surgery per recent data, has taken quite a hit, so its logical (although no hard numbers are in) that strip clubs being a luxury area are getting some of that same decline
Then for very odd reasons, lenders started letting stated income borrowers (among others) put little if anything down, then they added ARMs and teaser rates on top of this - and the results are now a disaster, however a good portion of the underlying creditors are in effect dollar heavy asian and other foreign based savers, who now in effect are having to buy up various american investment companies who are now taking major losses
Not sure how many strippers used these, but the ones that were marginal to begin wih are sure going to get hit
This is a CityVibe.com internet traffic chart - which some (on the pink site) seem to believe is proof that things are getting tighter
In my area housing rpices have declined, especially at the high end, but they're still well above where they were 5 years ago. The only people who have lost any value are those who overpaid to start with or those who bought more house than they could afford with a variable rate mortgage and now can't roll it over because they don't earn enough.
If you look at house prices over a long period of time (eg. 20 years or so), they increase on average at 8-10 percent a year (in nominal terms), with considerable regional variation. But that increase isn't in a straight line, it's more like the stock market with significant ups and downs. It's always been like that and probably always will be because it's so interest rate sensitive. People who buy at a cyclical peak are always going to get burned.
In the short term it's a zero sum game, because they guy who sells the house at possilby a loss is contributing to the future gain of the guy who is buying it.
Over the past 5 to 10 years easy credit in the USA to a large degree financed by by asians awash in dollars - helped lead to one of the most spectacular real estate bubbles in history. Basically foreign savers investing in american consumption,
Another factor one might call the "The Greenspan explanation" which he's spoken about numerous times, but which also is positive overall - was the millions of productive manufacturing workers, technical, engineering etc dumped into the free world economy over the past 10 to 20 year by the unshackling of communism in the Soviet Union, eastern bloc countries, and China - all of which helped keep the cost of capital (i.e. interest rates) down
The last few weeks have seen at least 3 major american investment firms being bought up, typically in the range of 10% of the market cap of such companies - and note the buyers: China (govt related entity), Singapore (govt related entity), and now Dubai - and reason is simple, asian and middle eastern (oil money) interests have been critically important in subsidizing american consumption via their willingness to (among other things) invest in recent years in CDO's dominated in u.s dollars, which are basically repackaged slices of mortgages supposedly covered by safe collateral - so they are now acting in effect as guarantors of last resort.
The Fed in fact had been upping interest rates for a number of years trying to unwind easy credit. The "Greenspan explanation" as I call it, is from comments Greenspan made on multiple occasion to help explain why interest rates and the cost of capital stayed low -despite what the Fed was or wasn't doing
Your thoughts?
Americans not only tend not to NOT want to live below their means, they tend to want to live above their means.
If you happen to read the book titled "The Millionaire Next Door" it turns out that aside from high earnings, living below one's means - is the central factor in gettting to those wealth levels, but people tend to not want to do that.
The question in fact asked by BookGuy was "I just wonder HOW all those Asians GOT TO BE "awash in money" such that they were able to be set up as USA's guarantor of last resort in the first place."
The actual question ASKED was clearly referring to the net aggregate savings of asians as a class.
The answer I gave is correct:
"Living below one's means is really how the asians did it, after having first of course massively expanded manufacturing by among other things using huge quantities of engineers and techs (who's talents were mostly being wasted under communist style govts) and then mass amounts of low cost labor - much of it brought to the cities from the rural and farm areas which were becoming much more efficient when capitalist styled reforms began to be introduced (for example in china) over the last 10 to 20 years"
In other words aggregate SAVINGS combined with efficient and low cost PRODUCTION supported by a talented (and previously underlized) labor force
Savings or consumption is a volitional choice, asians (as a class) tend to favor the first, americans tend to favor the second
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even the "no fee" doesnt save the night. The girls are getting worse, the guys are a nightmare, and the money is gone, gone, gone. In the 4 yrs ive been dancing (and before that i was a bartender in a strip club for 2 years) i look forward to the day after thanksgiving to the few days before new years. And it sucked. Nothing to look forward to anymore, damn it. Hell, ive been working a 7 hour shift @ one club then going to the other club and working another 7 hour shift, 2-3 times a week... with the only break being my drive there (however, it is a break from my dumbass boyfriend...lol). and the times i dont do a dble, i go in and work at least 8-9 hrs, the rest of the week. I'm getting f-ing bags under my eyes... im 26, f-ing sober bc im trying to get in law enforcem't and...well...you get it, and if it wasnt for my ADD medicine, id be passing out. WTF! still cant make it like i use to, and i was working 4 days a week ( and i mean day shift not night) for 7 hours...
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For example, I stopped by a club late Saturday afternoon with 3 hours to go on the shift, and its a time I rarely happen to go by, and a very hard working and (formerly) big earning ATF I know had apparently left her shift early per discussions with her sister. This ATF dancer works 6 shifts a week plus and rarely ever throws in the towel, but today (despite a large crowd) - she apparently couldn't take it anymore
Her sister and her sister's friends, also dancers were stuffing their faces eating a very large meal right at their seats, apparently planning ahead for a long 2nd shift that night, to make up for low earnings on previous shifts
The club was very crowded in fact, however the guys in the club were probably 90% ROCKS or something very close. Now I admire ROCKS sometimes, because they can stick to a budget, however its another sign the patrons are holding back on spending.
way way too simple, as (among other things) it doesn't account for very high average IQs of certain asian groups, doesn't account for a well known work ethic or the historical propensity toward saving by these same groups, nor does it account for the huge amount of talent that was being held off the global marketplace by decades of failed communism -talent which then was unleashed
Someday there will be a billion personal computers operating in China, and one can only imagine the kind of productivity that might produce
"nothing worse than a bunch of cheap horny bastard looking for a free show"
Reminded me when I was in a club recently, later in the afternoon and the parking lot is probably 3/4th full, which is alot of cars and alot for any afternoon at that club, so I expected the club to be really jumping -however when I entered the club it was only moderately busy, and except for a few girls on stage, there was almost no activity among the dancers, because the guys were not buying dances, instead they were ROCKS sitting stationary watching the entertaining stage show, with the dancers haven apparently made the rounds on these rocks, themselves basically becoming STRIPPER ROCKS
The question of exploiting workers is an interesting one. Are workers better off being paid poorly (eg. so-called sweat shops) or to have no jobs at all? An interesting philosophical question. I once raised it on the Pink site and was vilified, which I found interesting - some people apparently don't like to ponder questions where the only possible answers are unpleasant, unfortunately that's often how life is.
No doubt the big decline (at this point) is in stripper income, the clubs have ways to mitigate damage over the near term at least. However in the case of a random club in a random market, I don't see how this is a dancer supply problem, when its obvious many customer are either spending less or not spending at all - except maybe for the 2 drink min.
Yes, there might be an overlapping dancer supply issue impacting individual dancer earnings, however it doesn't seem to be the main problem right now.
The problem I'm continually hearing about pertains to customers spending either less or not spending at all. Except for maybe a few markets with low entry barriers to starting new clubs or expanding old ones, I don't see as an issue of being "the number of strippers ... growing faster than the number of customers" or a supply problem per se