Highway robbery, or just another night in the club

I find it amazing when large strip club chains charge insane house fees, dance fees, VIP and Champagne room fees and still expect their dancers to tip everyone under the sun, whether they do anything directly for the girls or not. There's door men, bouncers, champagne hosts, bartenders, djs, house moms............just to name a few. Depending on the club, there are more or less people with their hand out, but no matter where it is there will always be at least a few.

I've mentioned before a chain I worked for where I paid out at least 1/4 of my earnings in fees on any given night. That was before any tip outs to staff. They made so many thousands of dollars off of me in the years I worked there, and damn near every woman who worked there paid out similar amounts. The pure profit they made off of us was astounding. And it was a double slap in the face because not only did they take huge chunks of our money, but WE PAID THE REST OF THE STAFF OUT OF OUR OWN POCKETS TOO! It wasn't enough for them to make money hand over fist, but they wouldn't pay the rest of the staff a decent wage because they knew they could tell them to expect tips from the girls and we'd have no choice but to pay them. And if they didn't feel we were tipping them enough, they had the power to screw us over in little ways.

The dj would screw you over on the rotation or by playing music you hated, the bartender by ignoring you, the dance counter by marking you for more dances than you actually did, the door guy for making you wait forever before walking you out (or not walking you at all), the house mom by being openly hostile.............you get the gist. The only way strip clubs run smoothly is when the dancers tip everyone else well and often. It's one of those things that everyone knows is bullshit, but they do it anyway because that's just how things are done.

My current club (which is a part of a large chain) has a very low house fee, low room fees, and no minimum tip out for service staff. We still tip our dj and bartender, house mom and room hosts, but the club pays them reasonably well, so our tips are actually a tip rather than their entire pay. I hope other clubs will follow suit and stop forcing their entertainers to pay the rest of their staff. It's just another example of one of the twisted things that is the "norm" in the strip club industry. I'm not sure what it would take for other clubs to follow suit, perhaps a large-scale stripper revolt. We're certainly smart, willful, and resentful of paying out so much of our hard-earned cash to people the club ought to be paying. However, as I've mentioned before, organizing and unifying strippers is akin to herding cats. But I'd be behind anyone who started off the revolt.