Comments by docsavage (page 44)

On the subject of messed up lives, are dancers more likely to fall into that category than the average girl their age? It seems like many of them do have pretty messed up lives. The worst one I ever ran across smoked cigarettes, was an alcoholic, a heroin addict and ate nothing but junk food. She was beautiful at eighteen but looked like a thirty five year old five years later. She was also dishonest. She wrecked her car while drunk and then told the insurance company someone else stole it and wrecked it. She was the worst, but a number of others seem to have similar problems. Other than having dinner with one of them, I've always been hesitant to become involved in their lives outside the club and that would include looking at their social media or even exchanging text messages with most of them.

There has been an increase in local Indianapolis strip club prices. Two clubs went from $20 dollar lap dances to $25 lap dances and that seems to be the new standard in town. The dancers in these clubs are feeling the pressure of higher prices on their personal budgets and are wanting higher incomes to offset that. When the inflation gets out of control, price controls will be put in place at the demand of voters. That will lead to shortages of whatever is subjected to a price control since there will be little incentive for a business to provide a good or service if they are selling at a loss. That will be followed either by rationing or, in many cases, total unavailability of the desired good except on the black market at a much higher price.

What the previous comments said is good advice on how to write a good review. However, I think standards should be lower for non-tourist cities. Tourist cities will probably have a lot of reviews. A city like the one I live in, Indianapolis, may have several months or even a year between one review for a club and the next. I think it would be better to have a mediocre review posted than no review at all so the bar shouldn't be set too high. If the review is too brief or too vague, though, it is a waste of the time of the people who are reading it so certain standards still need to be met. As for prices, I'll usually include prices I know about. Many clubs have multiple room options, including very expensive ones I never buy so I won't extensively list all those. I do warn readers that many clubs in my city are strict about what is allowed and warn them they are gambling when they buy one and my personal opinion is it's not worth the risk involved of spending a lot of money and then not getting what you want or expect. I hate that feeling of having been cheated when I walk out of a club and have learned to be cautious. I don't get explicit about what the girls I run across do but I will provide the names of the best girls in the club as far as providing a good overall customer experience. That would include things like looks, personal hygiene, friendliness and an ability to carry on a brief conversation along with how good their lap dance skills are.

I agree that now that the elderly people in the high risk category are all vaccinated there is little reason for mandatory mask laws. Individuals can still wear them if they want to and businesses can make their own decisions on whether to require them. A bigger problem I see is that this crisis has been used as a pretext for the government to print out and pass out large amounts of money. You already see the beginning of inflation. For example, food prices are going up 7% annually. The government is doing this to buy votes and get people hooked on money they get from the government instead of money they get from working. Employers are complaining of having trouble finding willing workers. I've been having trouble with daily activities. My local barber shop normally has four barbers but now just has two and they have more guys wanting to get their hair cut than they can handle. I went to get my car repaired but couldn't because they only had one employee and he didn't come to work that day. I had a serious injury that required me to go to a hospital emergency room today. When I needed to go home, I couldn't find a taxi company with any extra drivers. The hospital had a police officer drive me home. I'm 64 years old and have never seen anything like this in my life and it is a little frightening that so many people don't want to work and want the government to take care of them instead. This is not going to end well for this country.

Strippers are definitely at the top of the list of things I spend too much on. Until my cat passed away several months back I also spent too much on him. He liked one of the most expensive cat foods on the market so I bought him eight cans a day at a dollar a can. That's $240 a month for cat food. I also spend too much on books, overpriced Starbucks coffee, organic health food and nutritional supplements. I spend less than most people on transportation since I drive an old car and then replace it with another old car, paying cash. I also save money by living in an apartment and not having a wife. Some day, though, after I retire when I'm too old for strip clubs I may marry a little old lady for company.

There was a club here in Indianapolis that built a raised platform in the center of the club where lap dances would be done. The idea behind this was that the club was having a problem with extras so the club staff could better monitor what was going on by putting the lap dance area in a place where it could be easily viewed. This also, though, made you feel like you were doing lap dances on a stage in the middle of the room where everyone in the club could see you and customers didn't like that. The club ended up moving lap dances into a side room, as had been the previous practice. The elevated platform in the middle of the room blocked the view of the stages the strippers were dancing on from half the club so all the customers then sat in the half of the club where they could see the girls dancing. This was the most poorly thought out strip club design I ever saw.

"They just want your money." I know they just want my money because none of them have ever volunteered to hang out with me for free, let alone have unpaid for sex. I'm twice their age so I don't expect that anyway. However, I do think they like some customers a little more than others. Or, maybe to be more accurate, they dislike all customers but they dislike some less than others. Some girls think guys their age are immature. Some girls think guys their age are disrespectful or rude, at least compared to older guys. Other girls think just the opposite and think it's the old guys who are rude and disrespectful. There is no such thing as a typical stripper and every girl is different. That means if the customer mix changes the numbers of the type of customer a particular dancer tolerates better or dislikes less may increase or decrease. The girls are acting like they like everyone but a lot of them are not very good actors so their true feelings come through and that influences their ability to sell dances in cases where they can't cover up their dislike or revulsion towards a particular type of customer. A dancer who can tolerate the old guys normally makes good money but if there are fewer old guys, for example them staying out of clubs to avoid a disease they are more likely to die from, that type of dancer will make less money and will therefore be more likely to quit.

Some dancers like older more mature acting men. There are not a lot of dancers like that but they do exist. If you are an old guy, like me, it can be a bit of a struggle finding these girls in a club but you can find them because they will be just a little bit friendlier than the other dancers and that will be the signal that you found such a girl. It's been mostly older guys who have been frightened away from strip clubbing for fear of catching a disease that is more likely to be deadly for them. That means the dancers who like or do better with older customers have had a harder time making money. I feel like they have responded to that by staying off work longer or quitting completely. I'm running across fewer dancers now who seem to be making an attempt to be friendly to me and seeing more dancers hanging out with and being friendlier to the young guys instead.

That's true of some of the clubs here in Indianapolis too. Waitresses and also female bartenders often seem to be the hottest girls there. It's partly what a previous comment said about noticing and wanting the girl you can't have. I noticed a really pretty waitress in a local club recently and wondered why they never had strippers there who looked like that. Then she came up to me and asked if I remembered her. I suddenly realized she had worked there previously as a stripper for years and I had done lap dances with her half a dozen times. It's also true some pretty girls just don't want to strip. There are more pretty girls working at the nearest Starbucks to me than at the nearest strip club. Really pretty strippers can make a lot of money because the stigma attached to being a stripper keeps strip clubs from being flooded by pretty girls competing with each other for customers.

I watch girls as they come into work and they often look better in their street clothes with no makeup and nothing done to their hair than they do later when they come out of the dressing room. I saw one pretty girl walk into a club last week and when she came out later from the dressing room her face was eerily pale like a corpse, she was wearing black lipstick, had a nose ring and dreadlocks. She looked like some sort of Rastafarian goth girl. It wasn't an improvement.

I've been noticing under staffing in the clubs with a shortage of dancers but many of the customers haven't started coming back so it's hard to tell how much of girls staying away is because of lack of customers and how much is due to the stimulus checks. The stimulus money may be a big factor because I've seen the same employee shortages happening elsewhere. I went to a barbershop last week that normally has several barbers but they only had two that day. While I was getting my haircut I watched three people come in and try unsuccessfully to get appointments for that day. The same day I took my car to get repaired and they told me only one technician showed up for work. You've got the stimulus checks, you have people getting extra money for each child, you have the three hundred dollar a week federal subsidy for those still unemployed, and you have people being able to skip paying rent since there is a moratorium on evictions. Until this all ends, if it ever does, there will be labor shortages throughout the economy and that includes strip clubs.

I don't particularly want them to approach me. I just want them to be friendly if I approach them. The worst is when some girl sits down at my table uninvited. She'll then ask me the standard stripper questions while pretending to be interested in my answers until she thinks enough time has passed to ask me if I'm doing dances. Sometimes I'll interrupt her and politely tell her at the beginning I'm not going to be doing any dances so she won't waste her time. Many of the dancers know that some guys are looking for a specific type or even might have a club regular so they don't approach, which is one reason you might not get approached when you go to a club.

If masks work then Texas, which ended its mask mandate a month ago, should have increasing cases while Michigan, which continued its mask mandate, should have declining cases. Instead cases have declined in Texas for the last month and Michigan has had an increase in cases and currently has the highest case rate of any state in the country.

Before Covid, each of the bigger clubs here in Indianapolis seemed to have three or four really pretty strippers who spent a lot of time with high spenders. Occasionally if I got lucky I could get lap dances during a slow moment for them but I often didn't get that chance. Now it seems like the average girl is about the same but those three or four extremely attractive girls in each club are missing. Maybe the high spenders were older guys who stayed away during the epidemic and while they stayed away the girls who were the objects of their spending decided it wasn't worth coming in for the reduced income.

The more puritanical types always disapprove of strip clubs. Their power has been increasing because the feminist left has increasingly joined the religious fundamentalist right in being against them. In recent years, rather than outright bans, city governments have used licensing and zoning laws to prevent new ones from opening. The remaining ones get older and more rundown and the neighborhoods they are in decline and their customer base dwindles since no one wants to go into a dangerous area to visit a old rundown strip club. Clubs then close on their own without the city government even doing anything. The Covid lockdowns are just another tool to hasten this process. There are other factors involved in the decline of strip clubs but this putting them in a separate category than other legal businesses and then requiring them to jump through more hoops to go into or stay in business is a major cause of their decline. They won't completely disappear, though, since there will always be some demand for this. The demand would be higher, though, if it was easier to open new clubs as was the case years ago when the clubs currently in existence were first allowed to open.

There is a theory of policing called the broken windows approach that says you need to stop minor crime violations in order to prevent a snowball effect where minor crimes lead to more major ones. Middle class flight out of the city results otherwise. This approach has proven to be successful when applied in cities like New York. The article linked to mentions public defecation. Allowing this can quickly lead to deterioration of the pleasantness of public spaces. Prostitutes and drug dealers openly soliciting business falls in the same category. Even if you think prostitution should be legalized as I do, you may not want a hooker hanging around on the sidewalk outside your house trying to drum up business.

Government officials like Fauci have been saying we need to reach seventy to eighty percent vaccination rates to reach herd immunity. They ignore, though, that many people have already had the disease and developed immunity from that. Some people also have T cell immunity, meaning they will never get it because the natural defenses of their body will fight it off. Once RO falls below 1, the disease quickly dies out. We may have already reached that stage. There have been big drops in case rates even though only a minority of the population has been vaccinated. Trying to force that last ten or twenty percent of people who are recalcitrant and don't want to get the vaccine to get it may not be needed. Vaccines normally go through a three or four year testing process and these were rushed through in nine months. The vaccine companies were also given immunity by the government to any legal liability involving bad side effects. So it's not totally irrational to be worried about the long term safety of these vaccines.

Indiana plans to end statewide mandatory masks and social distancing too on April 6th. The Indianapolis mayor, though, plans to keep them. When you see states open up it will be mostly the big cities with Democrat mayors that will opt out and keep the restrictions. A lot of state governors were hesitating about reopening but the states that have reopened like Texas, Iowa and Florida haven't had big case increases so it increasingly looks like it is safe to reopen.

I overheard an experienced stripper giving advice to a new one not long ago. The advice was be friendly but not too friendly.

I've never observed any animosity towards Asian strippers in strip clubs. I asked a Korean stripper one time if anyone had ever made any remarks to her involving racial stereotypes or insults. She said she just gets asked if she's good at math. Then she smiled and said she actually is good at math.

DeSantis for president with Kristi Noem as his vice presidential running mate,

Indianapolis clubs are now allowed to stay open until two in the morning instead of midnight.

I once came up to a school bus parked on the right side of the road. I slowed down. It didn't look like anyone was getting off and I didn't see any kids inside the bus. Normally there is a stop sign on the left side of the bus the driver flips out but that wasn't out. When I took the driver exam the book I used for studying said you needed to stop when the sign was out and since it wasn't out I thought the bus might be having a mechanical problem and was just sitting there so I went on by. I was then pulled over by a police officer. I then tried to explain why I didn't stop but he said I had to stop anyway whether the stop sign on the side of the bus was out or not. So I went to a lawyer and showed him in the Indiana state driver manual where it says you only have to stop when the stop sign on the bus is flipped out and he found the statute that came from and which says the same thing. When he showed that to the judge in court the officer then tried to lie and say the sign was out. My lawyer then turned to him and asked him what side of the road was he on. He said the right side. My lawyer then asked him if he was on the right side of the street and the sign is on the left side of the bus how could he see it was out. The judge then turned and stared intently at the cop. There was silence and then the officer got a sick look on his face and then the judge let me off. I just couldn't believe a police officer would try to lie in court instead of just admitting he made a mistake.

Thanks for the information. Classy Chassy, Harem House and Babes were all owned by the same person. When he passed away, the clubs were then run by someone who apparently didn't know what he was doing and all three went into a decline. I heard talk among the dancers at those three clubs about the possibility of the clubs being sold in the year before the Covid shutdown. It appears that rather than all three being sold together they were sold separately. Babes has already reopened under new ownership. Harem House has been repainted so is likely to reopen, though one former dancer there told me she heard it might reopen as a restaurant. I would think Classy Chassy would be viable as a strip club since there are no other nearby clubs. There may not be enough customer demand for all three clubs on Pendleton Pike (Harem House, Babes and PT's). The area has gotten poorer and the years of mismanagement at Babes and Harem House have given those clubs a bad reputation that will be hard to overcome. I don't have much confidence in the new Babes management. They charged me $10 one evening to get in when they only had two dancers in the whole club. When I complained to the manager about this he responded "those things happen" and "we need to do that to keep the lights on". I'm not going to a club where I'm charged that much only to find out there are hardly any girls there and I don't think other customers would do that either. In the long run they can't pay their bills if the customers stop showing up. Guys go to strip clubs primarily to see the girls and talk to them and buy lap dances from them, not to drink, so you need to have girls there and they need to be at least minimally attractive too.

I think there will be a continued slow decline in the number of clubs. The government isn't really following policies that will lead to long term economic growth. Our trade deficits keep coming in at record levels, the federal debt is exploding, the ultra-low interest rates encourage borrowing and spending instead of saving and investing, inflationary policies are leading to a rise in commodity prices like oil, and the lengthy Covid lockdowns have probably done long term damage to the economy. Visiting strip clubs is a luxury and not a necessity and fewer people will have the money for them. Sinclair posted a article here a few months back about how he has been tracking the number of clubs and there has been a steady decline in numbers since 2008. There are many factors involved here but the country probably never fully recovered from the 2008 crash and there has been a slow deterioration in the economy since then that will likely continue.