Exotic dancer fact #1 is that essentially ALL strip club customer spending now comes out of the 'disposable' incomes of those customers (since business accounting standards more or less outlawed the strip club spending on expense accounts). From a historical viewpoint, those customers typically had about 50% of their incomes available for discretionary spending, versus the other 50% having to be spent on 'essential' items. However, as the chart clearly shows, that 50%-50% mix has now been replaced with 56% having to be spent on 'essential' items - which leaves only 44% of incomes available for discretionary spending.

If you also consider the fact that average incomes have not increased significantly in the past several years, a decline from 50% of stagnant incomes to 44% of stagnant incomes actually represents a 12% decline in money available for overall customer discretionary spending ... including discretionary spending of particular interest to SW readers i.e. lap dances and VIP's. The problem may actually be even worse, since these statistics do not take into account the effects of rising state and local taxes further cutting into the remaining discretionary income percentage.