Seattle conditions, desert scrub, and strip clubs?
drewcareypnw
not the real drew carey, but I play him at strip clubs...
“are the clubs slowing down because of the huge burden of taxes in WA? the overwhelming homeless population in Seattle? the high crime rate has slowed down business? seattle has become a city over-run by drugs, crime and a cost of living that is simply not sustainable!”
Very interesting questions, scrub.
My take:
Taxes: our sales tax rate is middling, not high for the USA and not low. We have no income tax. I don’t think this would slow us down sc wise now, even if it was high… clubs have existed in the current tax environment for a while.
The overwhelming homeless situation… I won’t lie. We have a huge problem, not LA/SF level, but still fucking awful. I’d say that downtown restaurants and bars are suffering, but handy friendly sc’s? Not that I can tell.
Drugs: if you mean weed, then yeah for sure. If you mean heroin, then probably not as bad as the 90s. Not sure on this. Impact on sc’s? None that I can see.
Crime: there is an ass mountain of petty property crime. You and your Amazon packages are going to be separated. Of course the big A just replaces whatever get stolen, so it’s not a big deal. But don’t leave shit on your porch or in your mailbox. Murder/rape/armed robbery? Not sure about this. Lower than the 80s/90s. We probably have less “bum rush the Walgreens” than other big cities. We have a lot of fuckers creepy crawling bars at 4 AM and ruining local small businesses. I feel like a few German shepherds could fix this tho, so maybe the club owners are just pussies. No sc impact that I can see.
Cost of living: FUCK YES it’s unsustainable, unless you work for big tech then it’s manageable. For me, no problem. For the average waitress or dancer? Shit show. So I guess it depends, but I do hate to see my home town turned into a global center of anything. Dances are $40 and 3/$100, vip is $50 to the club and $300 to the girl… a bump, but then again everything was $20 for decades. Not sure how bad this is.
Seatttle dudes? What do you think?
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I visit for years now.
It wasn't until recently that I noticed homeless camps increasing
To the point they are just about everywhere.
To be honest, it's at the top of the list of places I'd rather not go to. That being said, I used to like SF and Portland but those places are no longer fun to visit.
Short term, that means very few homes will sell in Seattle. Longer term, it means many homes will drop 30% in value. That will eat up a large chunk of people’s net worth.
That will affect clubs, not to mention every other aspect of life.
Obviously, letting the inmates run the asylum is not the answer.
The exodus of middle-class Republicans has now turned formerly Republican Indianapolis, where I live, into a Democrat bastion and it's having negative effects on local strip clubs. Crime is increasing, along with homelessness, and this is driving even more of the middle class out of the city. They are reluctant to make the longer drive from the outer suburbs into what are now increasingly dangerous areas to visit a strip club and that is hurting local club business.
And people who don’t have or can’t develop that EQ, for whatever reason (yes drugs are a big one), end up on the streets. Both the left and the right have plenty of the “losers/unskilled laborers don’t deserve to live” mentality so idk why this thread has to start getting politicized.
Anyways, clubs are notoriously slow at the moment in many places not just the PNW. But the interesting thing, related to this site specifically, I remember immediately after Covid shutdowns all the nonstop “yay, I can’t wait for a recession so I can go bargain hunting” posts all over this site. The time has arrived, the fear and greed index shows “extreme fear” and that topic is…crickets
Covid was a weird time that shuffled a lot of dancers into pursuing other ventures, and others to become a dancer for the first time. And also a surprising number of inquiries along the lines of “I haven’t danced at a strip club since 2010, am I too old to return?”
My personal guess is: there probably will be a bump in availability for that type of stuff, but also at this point more people are used to not taking things for granted and can weather disrupting situations more and not do quick FSSW just because they are in panic mode.
Stripperweb has all kinds of complaints about dancers offering extras and working in clubs
Right now inflation and fears of inflation are making people belt tighten. And that inflation is caused by the leaders of both political parties burring up the printing press making those bail out payments. There was no economic activity to back up the currency. All it did was sustain the securities and real estate bubbles. With the economy stopped that was where the impact should have been felt.
But instead we destroyed our currency.
At this point the best thing to do is pass the Build Back Better with its upper income tax hikes, and pass the Green New Deal, and then go to Universal Basic Income, a strong public housing offering, medicare for all, and free college with college loan forgiveness. This takes care of everything material and monetary and it ends the conflict between economic and environmental goals.
SJG
https://tuscl.net/photo.php?id=3794
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcVwjg6k…
Sometimes, when you hear comments about the homeless, makes the Nazis seem like humanitarians by comparison. At least they were willing to grant a relatively quick death to the people they just wanted disappeared.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=227f4j0b…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLBORto4…
SJG
Chaka Khan - Melody Still Lingers On (Live, 1981)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyzrlndL…
If we want wheelbarrows of cash to buy a loaf of bread, and to eat dogs to avoid starving to death, sure. Otherwise don't take advice from someone who clearly slept through basic economics.
Things are costing me more now in other areas of my life and Seattle has gotten even more expensive lately so that means I have less disposable income to spend at the clubs. But I'm very new to the scene so I don't know how the clubs themselves have changed in the recent or not-recent past.
And I think all the issues mentioned in OP post are not unique to Seattle. You could apply all of them equally to Portland too, and the strip club scene here is largely unaffected by them as well. The scene per capita here is bigger though.
Anyway, I'm curious what happens in general to clubs when the economy sours. Fewer dancers? Clubs closing? Better prices? For example what was it like in 2008?
I've had long time dancers tell me that business dropped in 2008 and never fully recovered. I didn't start going to strip clubs until 2010 so I missed out on their best days. Here in Indianapolis for the last 12 years there has been a long slow decline with one of the local clubs going out of business every couple of years so that we now only have about two thirds as many clubs as previously. Seeing the shrinking number of clubs, the other remaining clubs didn't lower their prices or give better service to try to avoid the same fate. I expect recent trends will just continue.
Scrub: Seattle does not have the highest suicide rate in the country. That is a commonly repeated myth. King county has 12/100k suicides annually, at the low end compared to some of the more epically fucked rural counties. It's about the same as Maricopa county which has 16/100k.
https://www.countyhealthrankings.org/
What you also may not know about Seattle is that the locals like the rain. We find that without a daily dose of lubricating and refreshing rain, the webbing between our toes and fingers starts to dry up and crack, which is rather unpleasant.
We have grey weather a lot of the year, in may and June it’s starting to get nice, so people are getting outside.
July usually is a great month but May and June are pieces of shit.
The homelessness stuff—everyone loves to talk shit about the situation but it is a problem of most big cities today AND I don’t ever hear anyone proposing a solution. It’s not so simple because it’s not just like, a trash cleanup, it’s people. To me, you could pour millions of dollars into it and it’s going to make a very small impact—a lot of those people will just return because they are on drugs and want to continue being on drugs.
Anyway I’m not worried about the clubs, they are doing what they always do at this time of year.
It was….fine! 🤷🏼♀️🤷🏼♀️
The recession really didn’t impact the clubs in Seattle. There was an initial scare at the very start and I was working in Portland at that time, clubs became empty. I took off a couple months and I came back in January 2009, I saved enough money in 2 months to buy an 8 month old lease surrendered luxury car, my loan was for $6k, I paid the rest in cash.
The decline of the strip club happened in 2013, and I always said it was because of Tinder. My club was in a military town and we had a ton of business from young army dudes, that fell off at the start of 2013 and pretty much stayed like that.
One day i googled it—Tinder was released in Fall of 2012.
wrt your other points:
* people - seattle people are in general a strange combination of sjw liberal, entitled, and greedy. I say this as a liberal. i have some great people, but i've lived here most of my life and have found good ones. But in general, they're not great. So, I can't really argue with someone who wouldn't consider living here because of the people.
* the fucking traffic - again, hard to argue with. I work from home, and if I didn't I would never consider a job that require a cross-lake commute, or a commute from the suburbs. Again, not a problem for a well situated local, but a major hassle for newcomers.
* homeless - we have pretty much fucked this up. By trying to be tolerant, we've gotten ourselves a large permanent homeless population. City/State/County government dont seem to be able to spend their way out of it either. Seattleites generally feel that a society that can't house its poor and fuckups should do the right thing and solve the problem ethically. This has proven elusive. So, yeah the homeless are a big problem here. Of course once again not in my neighborhood, so it's a little easier for me to avoid.
* the fucking rain - webbed feet, etc.
* poor quality of life - this is subjective. For me, not at all. I like the bars, restaurants, job opportunities, music scene, extras clubs, water, mountains, parks, and access to the wilds of WA state. Most of my friends live here. For a sun loving conservative transplant? Hell on earth.
Build Back Better and the Green New Deal will always be paid for by recirculation and by upper income tax hikes. A net increase in gov't spending above and beyond taxation will not be there.
The COVID bail out money was not covered by tax hikes or, for the most part by recirculation. THis was completely reckless. It was when they started talking in Trillions instead of Billions. That was one hell of a lot of green ink on paper. So our currency has been devalued and this change is only starting to be felt.
Universal Basic Income will mean very large monthly payouts, but money given to poor people recirculates. YOu only need to raise taxes because it also fattens the fat, and only to the extent that that is happening.
SJG
https://tuscl.net/photo.php?id=11283
Jane - School of Rock
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdWq4w8D…
Stopping the economic squirrel cage meant something had to crash. It should have been the real estate and securities bubbles. But they instead decided to crash our currency. They printed money to cover expenditures beyond tax revenues at a level not seen since Weimar Germany. It was a stupid move to buy compliance with the COVID shut down.
SJG
Gimme Shelter
School of Rock
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwlRGS0x…
SJG
School of Rock Students Perform "California Dreamin'" by The Mamas & The Papas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlG-vN8i…
I’ve got the FRMOS blues.
SJG
@drew, sorry for contributing. I try to respect the OP's thread, but there's only so much mental retardation I can abide in silence.
Post at 6:30 pm PDT on Saturday or before a holiday, that's your best bet for a few SJG-free hours.
“are the clubs slowing down because of the huge burden of taxes in WA? the overwhelming homeless population in Seattle? the high crime rate has slowed down business? seattle has become a city over-run by drugs, crime and a cost of living that is simply not sustainable!”
"
THis is a curious and very refutable contention, especially the part about tax burden.
SJG
SJG
I pity you, this website being one of your only sources of interaction with the outside world.
You fucked up your marriage, can't even afford a cell phone to access the net on Sundays and holidays.
What makes you think anyone takes you seriously on anything?
SJG
https://tuscl.net/photo.php?id=3199
LOL, how many hours a day are you on the site again?
How many threads from how many years ago do you bump?
Our saving grace is that the library closes in an hour, leaving you to harass the small children and animals of the South Bay.
Sorry, Drew, I did it again.
But the reason I'm not having to do it all day and night, is because I maintain a privacy wall. My F2F life is firewalled off from my online life.
SJG
SJG
"Heartless" - Heart - School of Rock
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpkYYEV7…