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Thread: interesting stripper-nomics

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    Featured Member xoxoGracexoxo's Avatar
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    Default interesting stripper-nomics

    I'm in Boston for a week visiting an old friend, and thought I'd work a few days while I was up here. I don't have a car, so I'm limited to the two clubs in Boston proper, one of which -- the nicer one -- doesn't hire travelling dancers.

    So I've been working a few days this week at a very strange Cheers-with-tits type bar where fully nude, no-contact private dances are $25 a pop. They are HARD to sell. Girls make the majority of their money the old school way, selling $30 "ladies drinks." The deal is that you sit with the customer for as long as it takes you to drink the drink. Weird thing is, the same guys who will not for the life of them go into a private room with you and watch you get naked will spend crazy ammounts of money on these drinks. It's a blue-collar bar, and most of these guys don't seem like the type with a ton of money, but they will readily spend $120-300 on these drinks. The bad thing is, dancers see only $4 of this, with the remaining $26 going to the club. You can only finish a drink every 10 minutes or so. So if a guy spends $300 and you sit with him for a little less than two hours, you get $40. So yeah, it's a huge rip-off place for dancers AND customers.

    But I thought the drink-commission system was interesting. What really amazed me is how readily the guys would pay these outrages prices for not really much more than ten minutes of your conversation, and maybe to put their arms around you while you talk. I wonder if guys have a conditioned reflex that when at bars, they should be buying drinks for pretty girls. I wonder why more clubs don't do this. If I'd been making a reasonable commission, like maybe $10-15 out of the $30, I'd have been happy to hustle drinks all night long. But after a few days I couldn't handle making that much money for the club and that little for myself, and I left.
    Last edited by xoxoGracexoxo; 11-10-2006 at 06:15 PM.

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    God/dess holiday's Avatar
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    Default Re: interesting stripper-nomics

    Wow, you're right, that's a really interesting phenomenon (sp?). I wonder if you could have pointed it out to them? Strange. I couldn't work at a place like that either. I'd spend the whole time wanting to be the owner, not a dancer.

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    Default Re: interesting stripper-nomics

    Quote Originally Posted by xoxoGracexoxo
    I'm in Boston for a week visiting an old friend, and thought I'd work a few days while I was up here. I don't have a car, so I'm limited to the two clubs in Boston proper, one of which -- the nicer one -- doesn't hire travelling dancers.

    So I've been working a few days this week at a very strange Cheers-with-tits type bar where fully nude, no-contact private dances are $25 a pop. They are HARD to sell. Girls make the majority of their money the old school way, selling $30 "ladies drinks." The deal is that you sit with the customer for as long as it takes you to drink the drink. Weird thing is, the same guys who will not for the life of them go into a private room with you and watch you get naked will spend crazy ammounts of money on these drinks. It's a blue-collar bar, and most of these guys don't seem like the type with a ton of money, but they will readily spend $120-300 on these drinks. The bad thing is, dancers see only $4 of this, with the remaining $26 going to the club. You can only finish a drink every 10 minutes or so. So if a guy spends $300 and you sit with him for a little less than two hours, you get $40. So yeah, it's a huge rip-off place for dancers AND customers.

    But I thought the drink-commission system was interesting. What really amazed me is how readily the guys would pay these outrages prices for not really much more than ten minutes of your conversation, and maybe to put their arms around while you talk. I wonder guys have a conditioned reflex that when at bars, they should be buying drinks for pretty girls. I wonder why more clubs don't do this. If I'd been making a reasonable commission, like maybe $10-15 out of the $30, I'd have been happy to hustle drinks all night long. But after a few days I couldn't handle making that much money for the club and that little for myself, and I left.
    Remember the old saying, "Candy is dandy, but liqour is quicker"? They probably think getting the girls drunk will get him a chance with her.

    I would never sit with anyone for that long for $40. Screw that.

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    Default Re: interesting stripper-nomics

    That sounds almost exactly like the hostess bars they have in Japan. Men are basically paying for your company, conversation, etc...How interesting-I had no idea that there was anything like this in the U.S. Sorry about the crappy money though...

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    Featured Member Katherine's Avatar
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    Default Re: interesting stripper-nomics

    Wow, I know of the drink huslte, but the girls usually will get more if the drink is $30. Too bad.

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    Default Re: interesting stripper-nomics

    Wow. Usually in drunk-hustle clubs, the girls get closer to 50%. $4 out of $30??? I would've laughed in their faces and walked right out.

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    God/dess Jenny's Avatar
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    Default Re: interesting stripper-nomics

    I love the drink commission - I think there are licensing issues in most states, though. I was kind of a Viking at drink commission. But yeah - less tham 50% seems wildly unreasonable.
    I have taught that the sky in all its zones is mortal and its substance was formed by a process of birth

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    Default Re: interesting stripper-nomics

    Yeah I think more clubs should have something like this. When my mom worked in a strip club she said that was the way they got guys to pay for their time without having to be like "you know its not free for me to sit and chat right?" The drinks were 15 bucks and they got to keep TEN of it. So they banked and they sold alot of them so it helped the club too - they were just cheap fruit juice drinks so everyone profitted off them.

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    Featured Member xoxoGracexoxo's Avatar
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    Default Re: interesting stripper-nomics

    ^^Yeah, that was one good thing about it. Guys knew if they wanted you to sit there, they had to buy a drink, and as soon as they stopped buying drinks, you excused yourself politely and left. I wish more clubs had something like this, as long as they were paying a decent commission.

    The drinks were non-alcoholic (or very little) anyway, so the $30 was pure profit. I can't beleive how greedy the club was...or that the girls put up with it. From what I overheard, $100 is a GREAT shift here. I worked a double my first night and made $300...which at home would be disappointing, but the managers were actually bitching about paying me that much at the end of the night...like I was breaking the bank or something. Yuck.

    Stay far, far away from the Glass Slipper in Boston.

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    Default Re: interesting stripper-nomics

    That's how I made money in Amsterdam. The guys could get a prostitute cheaper than a lapdance at my club. They kept buying me the cheap champagne so I would flirt with them. Of course, once they turned around, the bartender girl would grab the drink and dump it. Then they would buy more. I made more money off my hourly salary + drinks than I ever did doing lapdances (which were no contact there.) See, sometimes it IS a fantasy!

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    Default Re: interesting stripper-nomics

    I lived across the street from there in the 90's...hahaha. I am guessing they rely on the fresh crop of broke college freshman pouring into town each year without cars as their source of potential dancers.

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    Default Re: interesting stripper-nomics

    This club is the last remnant of Boston's Combat Zone. All the strip clubs worked like this. The lap dance wasn't even invented back in the 70's, at least not in Boston. "Buy a lady a drink" was the way dancers made their money. They usually got a little frisky while sitting with you, kinda of a mini make out session. A few would cross the line and one might have gotten an under the table HJ from some...not unlike today's extras girls. I always thought they got more of commission, I assumed around 50%.

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    Veteran Member casaubon1's Avatar
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    Default Re: interesting stripper-nomics

    Postman is right. That is the old style hustle, which prevailed before table and lap dances. It frequently was combined with an attempt upsell to a bottle of champagne, with which would come a hour or so at a table "in back", with hints that additional things might happen. And in some clubs things did happen in back, provided there was plenty of additional tipping.

    Buying drinks for a dancer is not such a bad experience from a custy perspective, so it shouldn't be surprising that some customers are happy to do that. Even now a lot of dancers probably have customers who want to go to VIP and just sit and talk. In some respects it takes more skill on the dancer's part: she need to be a real conversationalist, sexy yet interesting.

    But $4 a drink is ridiculous. Should be 50% to 2/3s.

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    Default Re: interesting stripper-nomics

    ^^^ takes me back to my earliest dancing days ... although my recollection was a bit different !

    For starters, anything less than a 50% payout would have been laughed at by dancers.

    Next, 99% of the time customers would INSIST that the 'ladies drink' contained high octane alcohol - and would get very upset if it didn't (and also would refuse to buy more 'ladies drinks'). This pretty much guaranteed that every dancer would be shitfaced drunk by midnight, and also guaranteed that long term full time dancers either turned alky or developed liver/kidney problems or both !

    In many states, the 'kiss of death' for the 'ladies drink' hustle was the application of unintended consequences stemming from 'fairness in commerce' laws.
    These laws were enacted to prevent, for example, a storeowner charging black customers more money than white customers for the same product in order to discourage black customers from coming into their store.

    In other words, because of 'fairness in commerce' laws being enforced by the state alcohol control authority along with every other gov't agency, it became illegal for a bar to charge one customer a higher price than the bar was charging another customer for the same / equivalent drink. Thus clubs were faced with a choice of charging customers $15 (or whatever the 'ladies drink' price was) for mixed drinks served to customers, or to drop the price of ladies drinks to the same price that customer mixed drinks were sold for. In order to retain any bar business from customers, clubs had no choice but to dispense with the 'ladies drink' overcharging.

    This was also arguably what gave birth to Champagne Rooms ... where the price premium formerly attached to 'ladies drinks' became a separate 'rental charge'.

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    God/dess Bridgette's Avatar
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    Default Re: interesting stripper-nomics

    In some places, this is called B drinking, which is illegal.

    Quote Originally Posted by pheno View Post
    When you lead a nontraditional life don't try to measure it with traditional milestones.

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    Default Re: interesting stripper-nomics

    Quote Originally Posted by xoxoGracexoxo
    I'm in Boston for a week...So I've been working a few days this week at a very strange Cheers-with-tits type bar where fully nude, no-contact private dances are $25 a pop. They are HARD to sell. Girls make the majority of their money the old school way, selling $30 "ladies drinks." The deal is that you sit with the customer for as long as it takes you to drink the drink. Weird thing is, the same guys who will not for the life of them go into a private room with you and watch you get naked will spend crazy ammounts of money on these drinks.
    Maybe the guy mindset is that in talking to you and buying a drink, they've got a better chance of meeting you OTC than if they buy a dance. As you say, they'll buy drink after drink so they can keep you talking for as long as possible.

    And how many of these guys were aware that you were only getting $4 from having a drink with them, compared to (say) $20 from the private dances.

    If I had that whispered into my ear, together with the info that you'd look more favourably on me if I spent my money in a way that you got to keep more of it, I might decide that a private dance is a better way of getting into your good books than buying drinks.

    Question for you - was the bar set up so that it was in some way embarrassing for guys to walk to to the private dance area with you? Bet if the bar is getting $26 from drinks and $5 from private dances, they'll try and slant the odds in favour of guys buying drinks.

    Quote Originally Posted by xoxoGracexoxo
    But I thought the drink-commission system was interesting. What really amazed me is how readily the guys would pay these outrages prices for not really much more than ten minutes of your conversation, and maybe to put their arms around you while you talk. I wonder if guys have a conditioned reflex that when at bars, they should be buying drinks for pretty girls.
    As a guy I do have a conditioned reflex to buy the initial drinks if I meet a girl (let alone a dancer) anywhere. For me it's simple courtesy, but I would hope [in a normal social situation] that the girl would offer to buy her share after the first 3 or 4 drinks.

    In your bar, if you were being appropriately flirtateous, I might just consider another drink might get me your phone number. (And if that didn't work, maybe the one after that - or the one after that. It's called blind optimism).

    Us guys also tend to do the done thing. If selling "ladies drinks" is the way that this bar has always operated, then anyone walking in for the first time will tend to work on the basis of "when in Rome do as the Romans do". Everyone else is buying dancers drinks, so you tend to do the same.

    Phil.

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    Default Re: interesting stripper-nomics

    i did the drink hustle a LONG time ago. we did "champagne" but we got 20% of drink sales for the week , plus a paycheck of 350 per week and tips. no table or lap dancing. just *GASP* conversation and stage dancing.

    i also worked at a club again a long time ago that you got a $1 "chip" for each drink sold. so basically if you sold 10 drinks you had your tip out.
    this got fazed out of florida as the law changed to make it solicitation of alcohol

    i wish i would get a cut out of drinks, i sell quite a few... hehe

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    Default Re: interesting stripper-nomics

    Just a thought, but perhaps also for the men still shy about coming to a strip club, buying a drink might feel a little more tame and morally sound than buying a lapdance.

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    Default Re: interesting stripper-nomics

    Quote Originally Posted by Phil-W
    In your bar, if you were being appropriately flirtateous, I might just consider another drink might get me your phone number. (And if that didn't work, maybe the one after that - or the one after that. It's called blind optimism).
    My first club had a drink hustle, girls got %50. Many nights I'd sell 30-40 drinks because of that kind of optimism. Had 1 guy ask for my # all night, I kept telling him it wasn't gonna happen, my drinks didn't even have alcohol in them. He just told me shhhh it was his fantasy, or something of the sort, and kept buying me drinks & tipping me for my time.

    Jasmine

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    Default Re: interesting stripper-nomics

    i know all about the glass slipper. what a .... s- hole. are you still working now? I'll come by.

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