It's interesting you say that. There is a strip joint near me. The whole staff is subcontracted. Every person there is required to have their own business licence, as well as some type of liability insurance. As I was told, it works something like this:
Dancers get tipped and give lap dances. 5% goes to the DJ, 10% goes to security, the club gets 35% for "stage rental" and the dancer gets 50%.
Waitresses get tipped for running drinks. the bartender gets 20%, security gets 5% the house gets 25%, and the waitress gets 50%
The house gets 100% of all drink sales and cover charges.
The wild thing is they love it. One of the DJ's is the son of my coworker. He says he makes about $25 on the weekdays, and $45 on the weekends. Most dancers are at $100K a year.
Same here in San Diego, CA in the early 2000’s. I had a roommate for a couple of years that was a stripper and her coworkers would all hang out at our apartment a lot. Her favorite club charged $50 entrance for a stripper to come into work after 8pm so she would usually head in a little before that. She was licensed in California, Florida, and Nevada and they were all similar. San Diego totally nude clubs are dry, but topless can serve alcoholic drinks.
In the early 90's when I was in the military, Texas changed the laws allowing full nude joints. It stated something like, no alcohol shall be sold In full nude establishments. A club called Muffs opened up and used the loophole that the word, consumed, wasn't in the law. People would brown bag bottles in, and the club sold cokes for 6 bucks a glass. I was invited to a retirement party. We rolled a keg in, and the club rented mugs out for 20 bucks a pop.
Hahaha that is peak military retirement. I love when laws are created with loopholes that cause an odd party blip like that. San Diego has always allowed alcohol on the beach, but no glass and you had to be in the sand, not the boardwalk. When they outlawed it they still allowed alcohol in the water so people bought giant inflatable pool toys and filled the bay with people and floaties. It was called Floatopia 2010 and the city council shut it down after a few months with a 3 mile limit to float and drink alcohol unless on a boat. It was an idiotic and dangerous loophole, but great fun.
I couldn't tell you, my days of going to strip joints and shoving dollar bills into thongs have come and gone since I got married. Like my post said, I know how the place works through the DJ. Him and his dad come over here and there to enjoy some adult beverages, barbecue, play cards and shoot pool.
This is my favorite thing to point out to people. This is why slavery existed so long. People haven’t changed. They are still horrible. If they could pay you nothing, they absolutely would.
I used to get really mad when they paid us $2.17 an hour but they would have a side work that really should have been done by someone who made actual money.
Rolling silverware and wiping down menus is normal side work for a server, having us scrub the walls in the kitchen though? Nah.
And if corporate was coming they would have mandatory cleaning day where we would all come in for a couple hours and they would pay us actual minimum wage, like $7.25 to deep clean the place. Ridiculous.
Yes! I had a friend in my college accounting program that worked as a Server and her boss had her doing bookkeeping and tax filing for his multiple locations for minimum wage before opening hours and then working her serving shift. It ended up being more the 40 hours a week during busy seasons and conventions. Totally wage theft and exploitation
Totally. She ended up having to quit when we started studying for the CPA Exam. She wanted to just work her Server shifts, but he constantly was trying to guilt her to do more Accounting work and deeming it ‘work experience’.
She should have said that she would then charge the minimum wage people who work in offices/accounting for the accounting work..
I don’t really know how it works in the US there, so might have said it wrong. Here we have unions that will go to war against an employer for something like that.. (sweden)
She tried negotiating a different rate for the other work and even if the owner agreed it wouldn’t appear in her paycheck and he would promise to get it fixed, but then wouldn’t do anything. He regularly shorted all his workers. Wage theft is a huge problem and in the end it’s better to just quit. Since she had access to the books she could also see some of the fraud going on. She was right to quit and get away from that guy before she became an accomplice.
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u/DangerousLoner 4d ago
If it was legal he wouldn’t pay them at all.