After a long hiatus we visited...

After a long hiatus we visited this place again recently and were once again disappointed. This is a potentially great club that has a serious problem which is getting worse. To briefly summarize, several years ago they did a major remodel, and as a result this is as nice a facility as you will find anywhere. Combine that with a good group of girls and a friendly atmosphere and you have a great club, right? Wrong - like many clubs are doing today, they overinvested and now try to make up for it by charging grossly inflated prices. And as a result their business keeps going down. Every time we go in the place is emptier.

The obvious solution is to lower prices, so what do they do? Prices went up on June 1. The Champagne Room is now $150 per half hour, the Gold Room is $175. Not too bad, except that the house takes a big cut so the girls expect a big tip on top, which pushes these rooms way out of reach for most of the customers. And the $30 laps are fully clothed. We didn't see anyone, including us, buy a private dance on our recent visit. And few people were tipping the girls onstage either. As a result the girls' incomes are declining, and a lot of the best dancers are getting ready to quit. And when they leave, their best customers will follow.

This business model of a big glitzy ultra-fancy club with ultra-high prices might work well if you're downtown in a convention town like Las Vegas or a big white-collar city like New York, but in an out-of-the-way blue-collar area of a small blue-collar town like Baltimore it makes no sense. Simply put, there aren't enough white-collar customers in the area to support this place, and the high prices are chasing away the blue-collar customers that they need to survive. (We'd bet that Wagon Wheel down the street loves to see this place raising their prices.) Gold Club could easily be one of the best clubs anywhere but instead it's in a downward spiral. We think that's sad.