OK we all know that strippers these days don’t rank very highly in terms of legit entertainment. Right or wrong it is what it is but it wasn’t always what it is today.
In 1933 and 1934 a dancer named Sally Rand was shocking and titillating the nation with her “fan dance” at the Chicago World’s Fair. her performance wa so popular it inspired a candy bar named after her, the “Sal-Le-Dande Bar”.
She wasn’t the only one, in the 1960’s another stripper candy bar the “Gypsy Bar” was named after famed stripper Gypsy Rose Lee
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Strippers Weren’t Always Thought of as Sleazy http://t.co/YmpEAetyuk http://t.co/db3Z9NODuo
Don’t forget the notorious Candy Barr who was a stripper, mobster’s girlfriend, and one of the 1st “Porn Stars”.
I can write you a whole fucking book about what happened to strippers. There are a lot of why’s and where’s and hows… but it comes down to a simple killer that kills so businesses:
In a symbiotic business relationship, when the parties involved no longer agree on a common good goal, then things go to shit.
In strip clubs, the common goal is pretty simple: Have a nice club full of nice girls who don’t rip off or annoy the customers, they keep the customers in the room longer buy drinking and paying for dances and stuffing garters.
The problems arise when the clubs start out getting greedy. Charging a whole bunch of money at the door to get into the club already starts to defeat the purpose. Charging extra for “better” seats, and charging hi fees to access the proverbial champagne room is short term beneficial to the clubs bottom line, but it defeats one of the goals, which is to keep people in the game longer and keep the club full and happening. It’s the creation of demand, and the girls (not the booze) is the real supply. But when you make it too expensive to sit in those chairs to wait for the girls, when it’s too expensive to take a girl to the VIP room for a dance, then the whole thing fails. Most clubs “fix” this problem by raising the price of drinks and door fees. Good fix!
The girls create their own problems. Overly aggressive girls, girls that won’t go away when customers don’t want a dance, girls that are rude to customers, who try to over charge for dances or whatever, or who try to make “secret” money they aren’t telling the club about (by doing more in the VIP or even sometimes in the open room), they make it harder for the other girls to work, they create the expectation that more is on the menu, and they drive girls to do more. So instead of a good stage show followed by some good table dance action, the girls are paying fines not to go on stage and instead are trying to figure out ways to remove the money from the guys pockets as fast as possible.
It defeats the purpose, as the stage shows and such are their part of keeping the guys in the room, justifying the door fee and the higher seat costs, and generally making it worth staying. What happens is that the good girls (the ones who won’t put out X times a night or let guys finger them while dancing) don’t make enough, and they move on, and the club ends up with more of the sleazy girls that don’t want to work, don’t want to be on stage, and just want to hustle money period – short term gain, no consideration for long term interests.
The exotic (fan dancers) and the erotic (burlesque) has given way to lap dances and “yes,there is sex in the champagne room”. The business has become a greedy cesspool of club owners and girls each trying to pull the money out of the customer’s pocket before the other one can get it, no matter what the customer wants. That leads to the general public consideration that the whole thing is sleazy and not worth a moment of attention.
Plus honestly, you get just about as much nudity and stuff on TMZ…. 🙂
You summed it up pretty well rawalex. That’s exactly what happened to the strip circuit. Only thing I would add to your assessment is the addition of porn stars going on tour to strip clubs to meet their fans. Yet another way the customer gets fleeced out of their money.
Ya i giotta say Alex….you nailed it. I ran a strip club in Dayton OH for a spell but I ran it much more on your principles…we did have a cover but it was 5 bucks and we were generous with VIP cards and free passes that got you in for free.
We were in a blue collar area so I made the rule…music was to be classic rock and roll…period. no rap, no hip hop etc. I also went out of my way to make the club couples friendly, always talking to all the customers but specially husband and wife and boyfriend girlfriend customers. We actually got a lot of those and largely we kept them.
I also let my dancers work whenever they wanted…no schedule. I asked the to work 4 shifts a week but it wasn’t required. Odd as it seems that policy worked because the competing club had the same policy so we even had the same dancers in some cases. It also helped keep us on the contractor side of the are strippers contractors or employees battle.
At first i hired almost any dancer that came through the door…to make the hours optional thing work you have to have lots but the dancers liked it, the customers liked it and I liked it and soon I didn’t need to be as lenient as to who I hired, I always had a good population of girls at any given time. If i wrote a book on how to successfully manage a strip club every one of your points would be in it. from educating the dancers to not annoying the customers and its all way more than I can go into here, but suffice it to say you got it right dude…
Mike, the funny thing is that the same deal applies to many businesses. If you run a restaurant, the servers and the establishment have a symbiotic relationship as well: If the food is good and the atmosphere is good and the servers are good they all work together to make more money for the house – and for the servers who will get better tips. When one side or the other stops working for the common good, both sides suffer.
It’s part of what ails online porn as well. Selling porn on the internet is a complex combination of relationships that all have to work to both maximize money and maximize customer satisfaction. It’s a question of a value proposition put forward to the potential customer and supported all the way through the process. Tube sites (as an example) destroy the value chain by giving away the candy and instead using it as an enticement for other things. What it does is remove the value proposition of porn and turn it into a nothing more than a come on for other services.
The funny part of course is that they trade porn dollars for dating and cam pennies. But I understand the concept, which is certain companies feel that having 90% of a significantly diminished marketplace is better than 10% of a really large one. Like nuclear waste, once it’s out in the open air everything gets infected and there is no real simple way to clean it up. The porn world is radioactive as hell and no longer has the value it once shared. They killed off the symbiotic relationship between performers, producers, websites, promoters, affiliates, and resellers… so much lost so that a few can scoop up the crumbs.