I recently 'discovered' this post sitting in my Draft pile and figured I'd polish up a turd for you lovely readers to enjoy as the impending ChristMash holiday looms over us all like a meteor the size of Indiana filling the sky.
Obviously this post was started after I had quit Martha's Mollusc Menagerie but before I was hired on at the concert club that featured heavy doses of hipster "metal" and other less palatable musical genres. It was not a job that I enjoyed very much, although the people who worked there were awesome.
I figure the genesis of this installment was around Aug/Sept 2012, a couple of months before the impending specter of poverty and homelessness drove me back into the 'Herdin industry with my tail tucked between my legs. Lucky for me I'm an articulate giant because it makes landing bouncer jobs so very easy...
So, for the rest of this post, anything new I write will appear in blue, while I'll keep the original content in black.
Let's do this.
As I mentioned briefly in the previous post, I no longer work in the stripperherding industry. Burned out by all the twatery associated with the position, I chose to say "fuck you" and go on vacation.
So in the next couple of installments I'll be talking about some of the stupid shit I couldn't talk about before since I feared for my job. Now I can let the rage-jizz fly and not care whose eye I weld shut.
So...
Management. Let's talk about the management of a strip club.
Yes. This will be a good topic...
If, as an owner, you hire a professional manager to come into your corporation, charging him with 'cleaning the place up', why would you hamstring him every chance you got? Why would you not take into account lost revenue streams and severe bouts of customer dissatisfaction when you considered net loss of profits during his reign?
Don't get me wrong, the club makes a lot of money. A very serious amount of money.
It do real good.
But it has the potential to be so much more. It has the potential to completely crush its competition and rule a virtual monopoly on the Cooters and Hooters show in this town. It has the potential to easily double its income if it just had someone who gave a shit sitting at the top.
If you're not interested in running the business anymore, then for fuck's sake sell it to someone who does.
With proper ownership and management the employee retention rate would skyrocket and soon you'd have a loyal, well trained staff working for you. People who are happy with their job. That place could crank out money like a high schooler prostitution ring that manufactures meth and dabbles in insurance fraud on the side. It's not even close to living up to its potential.
So, if you've been following the blog to date you know that the main problem with this club is that there are a fair number of out of control strippers, or, Problem Dancers*1.
Some of the girls who work there are guilty of: Prostitution, Drug Dealing, Assault, Assault and Battery, Criminal Conspiracy, Attempted Murder, and a bunch of other shit I don't know the name of, all unsavory.
Mismanagement brings in this hired gun from Jersey to turn the club around. Obviously they're paying him pretty good money to lure him all the way from the fucking East Coast. He comes in, quietly observes the place for a month or so and then he make his presence known. Discipline is on the rise. Problem bitches get fired. Floor Guy morale ekes up a notch. He seems to be accomplishing the impossible...
And then....get ready to put on your shocked face.....
And then he gets bodyslammed by reality and it understandably takes the wind out of him.
He gets demoted to 'just do the fucking paperwork and shut the fuck up' because the owner got a billion calls from the criminals masquerading as strippers complaining that he was too strict.
He actually had the audacity to fire some of them. How dare he?
I decided to fucking quit when it became apparent that not only did the owner not care about his vaginally endowed staff running amok, he hired back a Mana-jur that had quit or been fired 5 times before to fix things again.
This manager proceeded to declare Open Season on customers and the titty-criminals were free to gut unsuspecting customers and wear their skin when the weather looked inclement.
The only piece of the whole shit pie that I liked was the fact that the new/old manager he re-hired was going to go right back to stealing from the club, just like he used to every other time he worked there. It's so easy to fudge paperwork and move numbers around that being management there is like a license to give yourself bonuses.
The single worst aspect of working at this particular club is that it tarnished the soul of everyone who worked there. The owner not only allowed, but seemed to encourage, an atmosphere of degradation and thievery on a scale I'd never experienced before in what is, let's face it, a tawdry industry. Anyone who had the misfortune of working there soon discovered that they were forced into an ever deepening cycle of moral entropy and criminality just to fit in to the environment in such a way that they could make a living.
It was sort of like a fiscal cage fight between various gangs, super villains and amoral sociopaths, all captured on camera for the owner's pleasure. Customers vs Lions sort of stuff.
Let me break down the above sentiment for you, gentle reader as I suspect that 99% of the folks reading this have not worked in a strip club before, God bless you.
Let's say that you're a just a regular girl who has decided to do some exotic dancing to pay the bills while you work your way through college. You're not an alcoholic, you weren't molested growing up, you don't have any drug habits or Daddy issues and you are not clinically schizophrenic.
You also have no desire to be a prostitute or to be groped like a Catholic altar boy at a Priest Convention, nor stay in the industry for a moment longer than you have to. It's just plain that you can make far more money in much less time and with a more flexible schedule that if you had a standard 9-5 job.
Ideal for a college student.
But then you discover that the stable of strippers you work with is rife with drugged out, alcoholic and frequently violent whores that don't care whatsoever what customers do to them so long as they're getting paid.
This makes your job much more difficult since you decided early on that having a stranger's digits in your ass isn't what you signed up for when you decided to go into stripping. Therefore you either have to lower your moral code to compete with the average sleazy dancer, find a different club and hope things are better there, or rethink you occupation altogether.
Unless you happen to be a world class beauty*2, you're generally forced to lower yourself into the muck to make money. This shouldn't be so. Strip clubs are supposed to be selling 'fantasy' and 'tease', not UFC style lap dancing and overpriced, furtive blowjobs.
The overriding climate of dog-eat-dog affects every level of the club. Everyone is so busy stealing from one another and trying to fuck their coworkers over that the concepts of 'team' and 'shared goals' are utterly alien.
Holiday Horseshit
Club sponsored Xmas parties suck. I should know, I have worked almost every fucking one of them over the past 15 years. All a 'Christmas Party' means to a titty bar is that there may be some kind of buffet featuring shitty food slapped together by your less-than-gifted lunch-felons, and possibly some sort of dumb Holiday-themed drink specials.
Like a Reindeer Milk*3 or a Santa Spuzz*4.
What it always ends up being is the vast majority of the staff getting wasted and a large portion of the staff that wasn't scheduled coming in on their night off, completely drunk and pressuring the few scheduled employees who aren't drunk to become so.
Even the management is drunk, at least the day shift portion of it. At one point in the night I had no idea who was supposed to be the Manager. One had stormed out in a rage. One was so preoccupied with keeping the kitchen from collapsing that he was utterly useless and the other one was drunk as a lord, swaying about the club casting meaningless benedictions at random.
It gets very frustrating when you have to start referring to your off-the-clock colleagues as 'the drunk assholes'.
Like when we finally got all the drunk twat-prodders out of the club at the end of the night and went into our clean the club mode. I kept having to ask my hammered co-workers to get the fuck out of my way as I tried to do the jobs that we ALL have to do when we're working, every goddamn night.
It's like alcohol completely erased the knowledge of our post-closing duties to those Floor Dicks and Waitresses who were hanging around the club, getting in the way of everyone and being as useless and annoying as every other lingering customer who'd ever haunted a closed strip club.
Merry fucking ChristMash.
I'm going to do some pictures and then publish this. It may be my last chance to put up new content in 2015.
May the new year be better than the old one.
-The StripperHerder
*1 The original title of the 1984 Tina Turner song before Capitol Records made her change it to 'Private Dancer' for legal reasons.
*2 A dancer who can walk into any strip club on the planet and instantly have a job.
*2 Patron with a splash of Bailey's Irish Cream. Fucking repulsive.
*3 Patron with a splash of Bailey's Irish Cream. Fucking repulsive.
