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13 years ago
@LeeH Sure the typical strip club expects so little of the DJ that they give the job to the owner's idiot brother in law. But this article is not about the typical strip club. It is about making a better strip club. I have spent enough time in college radio to know how to do this and anybody else who has spent some time in radio does too. You just don't hire the 'typical' club DJ.
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13 years ago
@LeeH
I was expecting to get more into this in a later installment, but there are two type of DJs and strip clubs tend to hire the wrong kind.
There is the dance club DJs and then there are the radio DJs. What you want for a strip club are radio DJs, partiuclarly Radio DJs with production, editing, and voice tracking experience, which many do. Radio DJs know how to multitask, keep a strict song schedule, have a distinct change between songs and do strong station (club) branding. And there are plenty of unemployed radio DJs.
By comparison club DJs are intended to get people up and dancing. But the only people dancing at a strip club are the performers, and that is their job. The goal of the strip club is not to generate a high energy party vibe but to get customers to pay for dances, an essentially passive activity.
That I think is the number one mistake that club managers make. They think that they need to go for 'party' when they should really be aiming for 'sexy'.
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13 years ago
Yes it is expecting a lot, but when it comes to the real purpose of the club, selling personal dances, that being personable is at least as important as looks and possibly more so. If they can't handle the interpersonal skills then they aren't going to be a moneymaker. The idea of the club is to give the girs who can really sell lots of opportunities to do so.
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13 years ago
For the average clubgoer it might be too much though, but I have a degree in architecutre so I am constantly looking at where I am and thinking 'how would I make this place better'. And I am particularly interested in building technology and what are called 'social factors': which is how the design of a building affects how people interact, and the strip club represents quite an environment where people are interacting intensely.
And yes I would do consulting.
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13 years ago
3leggedman: The next part (already pending approval) has to do with the stage. What you are calling the moat is more of a ground level walkway so that when the dancer is at the rail they are closer to face-to face level with you, In addition the plan is for the dancer to spend two songs of the three song stage set in the walkway close to the customers. In addition the 'tip rail' is 16 inches wide so it is intended to be possible for the dancer to kneel, sit, or even lie on it for a really up close view. Yes they won't be able to give you a mini-lapper, but you will be able to get more than enough really up close view and contact. Moreover from a sales standpoint I beleive that the lap dance area should offer something that you didn't already get stageside.
Motorhead: 4000 square feet, is about twice the size of a typical 'main street store', about a tenth of a large supermarket, and a twelfth of a football field. The current seating inventory in the lounge area is 6 two person couches, 18 lounge chairs and 12 stageside stools plus two more with poor signt lines. There may be room for a couple of more lounge chairs with poor views. The back area has ten lap dance stations and six VIP rooms. All lounge area seats are withing 15 feet of the tip rail. Could it be larger? Of course. But I think it is a good size for a new club in an existing market. Moreover small spaces are more of a challenge to design than large spaces. Bear in mind that the larger the club the harder to get approval. If you did need to expand, and could get the approval, the wall behind the stage is the dividing wall to the neighboring space.
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13 years ago
Knightra08: At slow hours in a small club you are perhaps looking at a half dozen customers. And they maybe get one drink per hour. That means your bartender is making one drink per ten minutes, and by making a drink I mean opening a can or bottle and pouring. Since your dancer clearly has the skills to open a bottle or can and pour it then the bartender is the easiest person to get rid of at slow times.
Some of the 'live feeds' to the dressing room are fake, and as a employee morale issue I think that the dancers deserve at least some locations of privacy. I am more inclined to have the webcam be on the main stage.
Enjoyer: As I said EVERYTHING starts from the local rules about what is allowed. Change even even slightly, for example allowing alcohol or not allowing private rooms, and the whole nature of the club changes. And how you promote it also depends a lot on local rules particularly sometimes promotion brings unwanted attention from the 'concerned homeowners'. Billboards, Print ads in neighborhood publications and late night local radio are all good choices. But above all you want good word of mouth.
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13 years ago
Book Guy: On the reasonable suggestions, the technology that I expect to replace the need for the 'floater' will certainly keep track of who is in or not. Whether or not to publish that or not is a different question. Since the design goal is to establish interaction between the dancer and the customer perhaps instead give each dancer a company branded twitter feed and allow customers to subscribe to the twitter feeds of their favorite dancers or to subscribe to a channel of all the dancers. This will give the dancers a bit more privacy than having to give out their personal cell phone numbers and it will give the club an ability to monitor what is being said.
On the unreasonable suggestions (inlcuding Doc_Holiday)...This is a thought exercise in how to create an ideal real club, not a fantasy club. A club, at least in the US, had to maintain a level of plausabile deniability that it is not a brothel. And most dancers, even the ones who regularly perform 'extras', also want a plausible deniability that they are prostitutes. I will be all for fantasy theme VIP rooms, but features whose only explanation is sex-for-hire would be out.
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13 years ago
Islandguy: The jukebox thing is one approach, but you have a harder time controling song length, often some dead air between, and more chances of having what in radio is called a 'train wreck' (two songs that do not belong back-to-back without a tansition). No cover does mean no lobby guy but you sacrifice revenue and it gives your door security a few moments to guage if the guy perhaps is trouble.
The motion sensing faucets I see a lot, as the motion sensing towell dispensers although I would be thinking possibly of air hand dryers. As for the urinals I do not know if they are code where you are but I am seeing a lot of the waterless urinals in new construction here. Saves on plumbing costs.
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13 years ago
no need to even drive, hop the trolley to the border. Admittedly it is not as easy to cross back as it used to be, but plan ahead and you have all the affordable action you could handle.
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13 years ago
Cany: Never heard of that, usually the laws are written around alcohol bieng 'served'. I have heard of places looking the other way at BYOB though.
Looneylarry: It really is quite simple. Club charges dancer $3 per drink (possibly via vending machine), Dancer gets $5 from the customer plus tip and its hers. No need even for the club to have a cash register at the bar. Plus of course the extra opportunity for interaction between dancer and customer.
Site selection is always tricky. There will definitly be people who will regard a vacant warehouse to be better than an active strip club (go figure). You are looking for a combination of high visibility plus tolerant neighbors.
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13 years ago
I agree pacer that in most every club in a fight situation everybody other than the dancers themselves are deptuized. But I also feel that the best security is the one that is alert to seeing and stopping problems in the bud, and that means not being distracted by other stuff. I would rather have the playlist on autopilot and the security 100 percent at attention.
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13 years ago
I hadn't realized how long it was until I saw it here! I think I will need to be more brief in the future. As to clubs going without security, I think we see plenty of headlines about stuff that happens in and around clubs even with security.
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13 years ago
Internet killed the video booth.
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13 years ago
@JYosa: if the Tribune article is right then they really put the cart before the horse. Anyway they appear to be hiring.
http://pinksgc.com/index.html
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13 years ago
FURTHER UPDATE
There is now additional signage. The main entrance will be right next to the exit I described in the prior post but there was a paper sign directing job applicants to the door in what used to be the hallway.
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13 years ago
@Boss435 Difficult to say, it depends on if they are loyal to the management (and stay at TL in Upland) or if the location is more convenient to them. On the other hand since the management is SR I suspect that the business practices will be more like them.
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13 years ago
I think the real thing that should weird out these young bucks is that if guys can't get dances from younger girls then the clubs will be filled with 50 year old strippers, because that seems about the median age of club patrons.
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14 years ago
Zoning ordinances come in several forms. Some cities to make requirements that adult oriented businesses be a certain distance from each other and from schools, etc. But more than that most zoning ordinances require that bars with live entertainment have a conditional use permit. That basicly means that the local government and owner agree on a set of restrictions and then the planning board has to agree, but more than that it means that anybody nearby has a chance to complain at the public mettings and bring pressure. So the bottom line is that strip clubs need to find places where the neighbors won't complain or the local jurisdiction doesn't care. Either tends towards industrial areas.
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14 years ago
On the stage getting delaying for too long can cause the audience to lose interest, but mostly it will be because the dancing is boring. The more important rule is that the taking it off should be an *event* in the performance.
The bigger problem is that with so much of the girls' incomes coming from the lap dances it makes doing a stage performance almost a waste of time in the dollars per minute department. The same thing goes fom the customer's standpoint. If a LD is 20 dollars a song then a dollar tip on the stage should get a quantity of attention worthy of one twentieth of a lap dance. If it doesn't then certainly the customers will use their budget where it will get the best deal.
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14 years ago
Odd, most places I have been to simply used a cash register, no entry tickets at all. The presumption that the kind of controls used at a theatre apply to a strip club isn't valid because at a strip club the door fee is not at all where the money is. The money is of course in the dances and in the overpriced drinks.
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14 years ago
First of all polie dancing is hardly dying. It is in fact going mainstream and international.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/13/international-poledancing_n_795787.html#s205605
As to why it seems to be becoming something of a lost art in strip clubs I have several theories.
1. Clubs installing video screens showing sports or porno. If a girl is putting out a lot of energy and half the audience is staring off at something else, who wouldn't quickly figure why bother?
2. Fear of injury. It might be a personal fear or a club rule.
3. Other girls working the audience. This is kind of like the video screen problem. If the dancer is putting out a lot of effort and every guy in the audience is looking at the girl sitting next to him and touching him the 'why bother' factor gets quite high.
4. The fact that it has gone mainstream. It isn't a performance form only restricted to clubs. If you want to see an example of really amazing pole dancing YouTube has plenty.
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14 years ago
What all the SS is about is trying to get some guy to see themselves as the white knight that will rescue the beautifull but imperiled damsel. And unfortunately there are guys willing to beleive that they are playing that role. So sometimes it works, and thus it might be worth trying.
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14 years ago
I've heard others complain how vegas has gone for fun and funky to corporate.
Vegas has always been about glitz, but what it has now become about is conspicuous consumption. That is the spending of money simply to show off the fact that you have money to burn. That applies equally to the bigger-bigger-bigger attitude of the casinos themselves but also the behavior of the visitors. And cash spent showing off at the strip clubs can be more easily hidden upon return as having 'lost it at the tables'.
I remember the original Crazy Horse on Paradise Road. It was a place that maybe could have had a dozen dancers working at once, nice and personal. Couldn't survive. Do you honestly think that your favorite hometown club would last a year transplanted to Industrial Road?
All that high end marble and chrome and glitz costs money. Square footage costs money. Paying off cab drivers costs money. It all has to be made up at the door or by charging the dancers more for use of the private rooms.
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14 years ago
<p>Actually the current crop of 'Tea Party' types is less in the Ayn Rand mold that the Bush/Cheney type conservatives. The real reason why she is so associated with neoconservatives is her book <i>Atlas Shrugged</i> which is at the top of their reading list.</p>
<p>The part of the premise of that book that the neocons love so much is that there is a tiny elite of people, the titans, who uniquely possess the ability to generate economic benefit not just for themselves but for everybody else too. And if you annoy them too much (such as by failing to give them lower taxes and no regulation) then they will just take their ball and go home and everything will go to hell in a handbasket in no time flat. Although contradicted by emperical reality it none the less is an attractive myth since it means that investment bankers, hedge fund managers, etc. have every reason not only to feel no guilt about their disproportionate earnings and political clout but to feel entitled to it since it is the reason why the rest of us can even manage to get by at all without klutzing ourselves to the stone age.</p>
<p>But since this is supposed to be a lighthearted site about strip clubs, let's write a plot synopsis for <i>Atlas Stripped</i>
<p>Joannie Galt was the hottest stripper ever. Her pole moves were astounding and her lap dances to die for. She raked in tons of money for herself and Club America. She wasn't just a Ten, she was a TenTen, and the most respected of the TenTens at Club America. Until the owner got greedy in order not simply to keep the club maintained but also to keep up with the ever growing demands of the TenTens. So the TenTens decided that they would just take their money and go on permanent vacation. After which the club completely went to crap until the owners came pleading back to the TenTens and give them whatever they wanted to save it.</p>
<p>...or maybe instead the owners of Club America just went out and hired a bunch of new girls who quickly learned the moves and weren't the arrogant greedy demanding b****es that Joannie and her friends were. Just saying....</p>
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14 years ago
I think they are in denial. I also think that a majority of the dancers are in denial too. And more than a few of the customers.