Tuesday Night Visit to Mpire in Washington DC in 2022

I visited Mpire Gentleman's Club in Washington DC on the evening of Tuesday, August 2nd around 10:15pm, because I saw the reviews online and it was supposed to be one of Washington DC's better strip clubs. While I would probably be overstating things if I were to say I was disappointed, the experience was definitely lacking in some respects.

This is the first strip club that I have been to where there were no table dances or lap dances at tables or on the floor of any sort. Basically if you are one of the girls that works there, there are only 2 ways you can make money - by dancing on the stage and getting tips during and immediately following your stage dance, or by getting a customer (read, sucker) to spend time with you in VIP. As a result, one thing that happens that is at least mildly annoying about this club is that literally almost if not every girl immediately walks the entire floor after their stage dance and asks everyone on the floor for tips for "watching" their stage dance - irrespective of whether you actually did or not. So that puts you in the position of either constantly handing out ones to every one of the girls that's working, or getting branded as "cheap" if for whatever reason you decide not to. On the flip side, there is no cover, so maybe this is a way that the club somehow makes it up by charging the dancers a high house fee? Not sure, but I'm speculating here.

So on to the VIP dances. I am not actually from the Washington DC area, as I was just here on business, so I don't have a very good frame of reference as to how strip clubs operate here. I will say that the only other strip club I've been to in the area is "The House Club" on Georgia Street, and the dances were much more high mileage there. I didn't actually get a VIP dance at Mpire, but the rationale behind that is that the cost of the VIP dances is $455.00 per half hour, or $845.00 per hour, and the bouncers went out of their way to tell me that there was no touching in VIP on more than one occasion.