Becoming a Super Stripper

While I was in Europe I got behind on some interesting posts. Freakonomics and others pointed me to this one:

Let’s face it. Stripping is hard work. There’s judgment from outside the club. Competition inside the club. And, you’re an independent contractor. There’s having to make nice when you don’t feel like making nice. There’s the pressure to hustle. Pressure not to hustle. There’s the standing in 8″ heels all night. And above all, the ever-present challenge of making bank. That’s where Star Light’s Exotic Dancer, M.B.A. comes in! Spend the day with us, and we’ll share tips on sales (because stripping is sales), organizing your finances, and managing the day-to-day stress of stripping. Find your path to being a SuperStripper. What’s a SuperStripper? She’s an amazing woman who uses stripping as an avenue to create financial freedom and the future she wants! Someone who doesn’t let the job define her.

There is no doubt that more money can be made if dancers use proper techniques. In fact many of them are budding neuroscientists. The link between sex, money and risk is well established. And once the money is made, properly managing it is of the utmost importance since their careers are often very short.

Independent Contractors

Most Strippers are classified as Independent Contractors, and they pay a stage fee to work at the club. I'll let you read the IRS FAQ, or the 20 Factor Test of the IRS, to see how you might classify them. You can also read the Fair Labor Standards Act. It seems as a lawyer in Tuscon is trying to change this by enlisting some dancers in Vegas in a class action suit:

The Nevada Supreme Court has given a go-ahead for a class-action lawsuit by an Arizona lawyer who wants Las Vegas strippers classified as club employees and paid wages by the owners of clubs where they work.

Many of the estimated 10,000 strippers in Las Vegas pay a fee to dance at clubs and sign agreements classifying themselves as independent contractors. They get no pay or benefits and earn only tips.

A panel of high court justices ruled 3-0 on Thursday that lawyer Mick Rusing of Tucson can bring a class-action lawsuit on behalf of strippers seeking to change that arrangement.

``This is going to force employers to stop living off the backs of these women,'' said Sean Brearcliffe, a lawyer at Rusing's firm. ``Some of the clubs don't pay them anything and force them to pay as much as $50 to $100 per hour out of their tips. Nevada law does not let employers take tips earned by their employees.''

Brearcliffe said that in coming months he plans to file a class-action lawsuit in Clark County District Court to force strip clubs to hire dancers as they do other employees.

If a class-action lawsuit succeeds, it will allow dancers to keep their tips and receive wages, Brearcliffe said. Clubs will have to raise revenue through higher entrance fees, drink prices and other means if his law firm persuades a judge to prohibit the independent contractor arrangement, he said.

Brearcliffe said strippers will be notified of the litigation and their right to participate if his law firm brings action against the clubs where they work. The law firm would represent the strippers on a contingency-fee basis.

Without weighing in on who is right or wrong in this debate, let me quickly sketch the issues. The battle appears to be over money and risk. At the moment with the class action lawsuit, dancers are trying to shift some of the wage risk onto the club. Since the women provide the primary product this might make sense, however we should acknowledge what the clubs provide.

Remember there is an alternative market for stripping services. Look in any phone book and you will find ads for entertainers who will come to you to preform. So what is it that clubs provide? A market, a coordinated place where dancers and customers can meet. True the phone book provides a market as well, but there are inefficiencies involved. Transaction costs are higher in the phonebook market. Asymmetric information is a larger problem. You can't verify dancer quality in the phonebook market. Whereas in the club environment, there are better opportunities to reduce those asymmetries and better match dancers with customers, while also increasing the number of matches (and thus income of the dancers). And don't forget the improved pleasure of the customers.

Think about a bachelor party with heterogeneous preferences in terms of hair color of the dancer. In a phonebook market, even if they can request a certain hair color dancer likely they will be unable to fulfill all the preferences of the bachelor party participants. Economies of scale allow the clubs to solve this problem, by providing many girls.

The other problem clubs solve is security for dancers. Here again, economies of scale serve to reduce the security costs per dancer, while simultaneously increasing their level of security.

I have always found the labor issues in strip clubs fascinating. The women are the ones who hold and sell the primary experience good, yet the clubs deserve some of the revenues for the coordination and services they provide. So the club figures out a way to extract their share from the customers and the dancers. And this leads (in my view) to some very different and bizarre approaches.

Let me be clear, I am not weighing in on the question of whether they should or should not be classified as employees, I'm merely trying to think about the value clubs provide the dancers.

Loonie Power

The rising value of the Canadian Dollar has led to cross border labor flows...of strippers.

With the Canadian dollar surging against the U.S. greenback, Robert Katzman is dealing with situations they don't teach in Economics 101.

The owner of five strip clubs in Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, says American dancers are heading to Canada to earn the strengthened Canadian currency, and Canadian customers are heading to Detroit because their dollars go further there. He's fighting back by advertising more in the U.S. and offering free limo service to get Detroit men to visit his Windsor clubs. [...]

Mr. Katzman, the Windsor strip-club owner, is philosophical. He says that, last year, 90% of his dancers were Canadians. About 200 of them drove down from Toronto and Montreal to take advantage of the U.S. dollars American men typically paid with.

This year, he has more American women dancing in his Canadian clubs -- about 160 -- than he has Canadians.

It's a nine-hour trip from Montreal to Windsor, Mr. Katzman explains, and with the loonie as strong as the dollar, the dancers can earn just as much money up there. "As a business decision, it just doesn't make sense," says Mr. Katzman.

Ovulating Strippers

Yes, you read that right. From the latest Economist, ovulating strippers make more money.

“BECAUSE academics may be unfamiliar with the gentlemen's club sub-culture, some background may be helpful to understand why this is an ideal setting for understanding real-world attractiveness effects of human female oestrus.”

No doubt readers of The Economist are equally unfamiliar with this sub-culture, but for Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico, who penned the words above in a paper just published in Evolution and Human Behaviour, such clubs are a field site as revealing of human biology as the Serengeti is of the biology of lions and antelopes. Dr Miller is an evolutionary psychologist—and the author of the theory that the large brains of humans evolved to attract the opposite sex in much the same way that a peacock's tail does. His latest foray, into the flesh-pots of Albuquerque, is intended to investigate an orthodoxy of human mating theory. This is that in people, oestrus—the outward signs of ovulation—has been lost, so that men cannot tell when women are fertile.

This theory is based on the idea that in evolutionary terms it benefits women to disguise when they are fertile so that their menfolk will stick around all the time. Otherwise, the theory goes, a man might go hunting for alternative mating opportunities at moments when he knew that his partner was infertile and thus that her infidelity could not result in children.

However, this should result in an evolutionary arms race between the sexes, as men evolve ever-heightened sensitivity to signs of female fertility. Dr Miller thought lap-dancing clubs a good place to study this arms race, because male detection of female fertility cues would probably translate into an easily quantifiable signal, namely dollars earned. He therefore recruited some of the girls into his experiment, with a view to comparing the earnings of those on the Pill (whose fertility was thus suppressed) with those not on the Pill.

The results support the idea that if evolution has favoured concealed ovulation in women, it has also favoured ovulation-detection in men. The average earnings per shift of women who were ovulating was $335. During menstruation (when they were infertile) that dropped to $185—about what women on the Pill made throughout the month. The lessons are clear. A woman is sexier when she is most fertile. And if she wishes to earn a good living as a dancer, she should stay off the Pill.

The article is here.

Last Minute Gift Ideas

For those last minute gifts for your favorite tech nerd, you might want to try this USB Pole dancer.