As recently as three of four years ago, the club I work at was one of the best in town. The club has managed to keep a (not totally undeserved) reputation for having pretty dancers and being a classy place, and still brings in some high rollers. It still has a veneer of class, but it's got a lot of bad-club symptoms: dancers walking around in mismatched bikini tops and bottoms, or not bothering to put their clothes back on after a private dance; drunk and stoned dancers; a peanut gallery of cheapskate regulars who come in and nurse a beer all afternoon without ever tipping the stage or buying a dance; a shrinking number of white-collar regulars; too much hip-hop music, and so on. I've only been at the club six months, but I've seen things getting worse and business slowing down even in that ammount of time. There's just a lot of bad energy in the place, and zero momentum. Even for a good hustler, selling dances is like pulling teeth.
Now there's some reason to believe that things are changing. One of the old managers has been replaced, and the club had a mandatory dancer meeting yesterday, where they acknowledged all the problems above and laid out what they would do to fix things (clean the club more often, advertize more, throw more special events, enforce dress codes for dancers and customers) and what they expected us to do (dress nicely, lose weight, and stop doing extras.) They told us it might take a few months, but they were going to turn business around. That would be awesome, if management really does what they say they'll do, and if it really works. But I wonder how easy it will be to win back customers who've moved on to greener pastures, especially if the no-contact rules are enforced. There are a lot of customers right now who come in because the club is starting to have a reputation as an extras haven, so we'll lose that business. Not that that's much to complain about, from my point of view, but it's still money out the door.
My question is, has anyone ever seen a club recover from a slump like this? What did it take? How long was it before business was good again. There are things about the club that I like, and I'd stay if I thought business would pick up in the near future, but if it's going to be like this much longer, there's no point in sticking around.



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So many DJs just run a computer playlist and swear they make the difference in our money. Your approach earns a fat percentage!


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