I found a similar article from June of 2022 about the stripper index signaling a recession, so clearly it's not a very good indicator. A stripper is typically a short-term career, so it wouldn't make sense to rely on observations made over such a short period. Maybe things are just returning to normal after a boom, and none of the interviewed people were around pre-boom.
The personal savings rate, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT, might be a better proxy of whatever the stripper index is actually signaling. It was at a low in the summer of 2022 and is nearing a low again. Less money in savings means less money to spend at strip clubs. It doesn't, however, automatically mean recession.
ozten 2 minutes ago [-]
The media needs to report a more realistic inflation metric. Groceries are wildly expensive.
elmerfud 9 hours ago [-]
Or it could be that people are just tipped out. I hadn't been to a strip club in several years but I got dragged to one a few months back by a friend and I got to tell you the money that these girls wanted seem to astronomically high for the service that they were providing. Maybe people are just fed up with it and spending their discretionary income in other ways. The girls turn their nose up at a couple dollars on stage and are pushing for $500 private dances.
It's just blew my mind. I'm not sure what the house take is but $500 for a private dance for an hour was insane. Senior consultants that solve million dollars problems don't charge that much per hour. I literally had to explain to one of these girls how insane the price was. Because for $500 from the USA if you live near any major airport hub you take a long weekend trip to several Central and South American countries where you can have a whole lot more fun than you can at one of these strip clubs, and you're all in for $500. If that's your chosen form of entertainment, it literally makes no economic sense to spend any money at these strip clubs.
I think at one time using a stripper index as a proxy for a recession measurement would have been good. Nowadays I don't think that's a valid way. Too much has changed across the sex entertainment industry, and the attitudes of the customers have also changed because even if all you want to see is girls dancing there's better value for your money with the other options that are available. Many of those options you don't even have to leave your house.
Maybe a better proxy for a recession measurement would be something like top golf earnings. Or some other discretionary entertainment place similar to that. Are people going on outings spending their discretionary income in that way or are they saving it or did they just not have it to spend.
mycologos 2 hours ago [-]
I think your explanation is missing a competitive element that drives the $500 price. Two similar examples:
1) Maximum City is a book about various people in Mumbai around ~2000. One of them is a sort of stripper (she dances and sometimes dates in a transactional way; I don't remember how explicit it all is). Her analysis is that her clients are partially paying for her but more so for "winning" her over the other clients. The point isn't that one of them takes her shopping and gets to watch her choose handbags; the point is that nobody else gets to go.
2) I read a long article about economic strategies behind webcam shows (by a performer, maybe by Aella?) and the author made two points that I remember: one, it's good to have a stupidly high priced item that a whale can roll in and buy. Two, she had success having a high priced item that "saved" her, e.g., if you pay $X I won't have to eat this gross thing I made. Neither one of these is really about the thing, it's about the feeling of out-competing the other guys there.
So while you're $500 example makes sense if somebody is just looking for the dance (or whatever) itself, it doesn't make sense if that person actually wants to "win" over the other patrons (and doesn't view the poorer patrons in the poorer country as real competitors).
nindalf 27 minutes ago [-]
I'm kind of with you on this.
The stripper index makes sense when they were servicing a need no one else could. But the rise of OnlyFans means that at least some of the money that would have gone to strippers is going to performers on OnlyFans.
That's the issue with the Stripper index, is that it's vibes based because we can't actually measure how much the industry earned. If we listened to how people felt America should have been through 4 recessions in the last 3 years.
josefresco 56 minutes ago [-]
I don't know what kind of strip club you attended but the "average rate" for a 1-on1 dance is $20 (sometimes with an additional fee for the private room). That's for 1 song, typically 4-5 minutes. That equates to about $240 for an entire hour. Paying for a stripper to spend an hour with you is excessive, unless you are a high roller or are (as many are) expecting more than just a dance. Maybe you visited a "high end" club, or maybe you got taken for a ride (which I've seen happen to rich, inexperienced young men).
virtue3 3 hours ago [-]
I think 500$ for an hour might have been a little more than a dance, and probably inline with what that kind of service offers.
If not did you goto one of the top strip clubs in America? that sounds insane. Haven't been to a strip club in a real long time myself tho (absolutely don't have the income nor desire).
I think top golf is an interesting metric; I'd be concerned about linking it to two things so addictive - golf addicts and alcohol consumtion. But with the prices at top golf and how much the drinks cost it's probably a good indicator of the sector.
One of the downsides of it might be it only targetting people in upper income brackets (golf is an expensive game per se, def not as everyman and top golf isn't really accessible).
Then again I can't think of any metric that wont be "inflated" by more well off people consuming something cheaper and less well off people having to use another option (aka mcdonalds).
elif 2 hours ago [-]
I encountered similar prices at a Miami Beach club. Initially the security pressed me because I don't drink alcohol, but apparently buying drinks was required (in addition to the cover). In order to satisfy them, I said I would buy a dance, but wasn't given a price until already up in the "VIP" area
The price was ridiculous, I don't recall exactly, and I declined, saying I would just leave, and the dancer said in a Russian accent, if I did, she would tell security that I robbed her, since we already entered VIP. I think I paid her like $60 in front of the security guard and walked out. Definitely got mob/extortion vibes from the whole experience.
In this example, at least the $50 per 3 minutes or whatever it was, wasn't for anything 'extra' as the VIP area was wide open with no walls, all the victims able to see exactly how scammed everyone was getting.
salad-tycoon 3 hours ago [-]
I’ve never lived this lifestyle and don’t agree with it but here’s an AMA from a guy who claims to regularly get high end escorts. Supposedly the cost is anywhere from 250-1000 and that might be Australian dollars?
https://old.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1cfpcfl/ive_slept_with...
viraptor 1 hours ago [-]
You can just browse the backpage for a bigger city to get an idea of prices. Apparently basic sex pays below $200h/h in Seattle (chosen at random), so those higher prices would likely be for a night/event/high class.
chasd00 2 hours ago [-]
I knew a guy that was a driver for escorts back in college. In the late 90s it was over $1,000/night on average iirc. That included more than just sex though that was also attending a gala or sports game or other social events with you.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2 hours ago [-]
Per hour or per night?
itsoktocry 55 minutes ago [-]
>I literally had to explain to one of these girls how insane the price was
I'm sure she loved that.
>Maybe people are just fed up with it and spending their discretionary income in other ways.
My friend, paying for "sex" will be one of the last things to go.
>Because for $500 from the USA if you live near any major airport hub you take a long weekend trip to several Central and South American countries
Do you think these are substitutes?
wongarsu 15 minutes ago [-]
> Do you think these are substitutes?
Depends on the strip club prices in those countries I guess.
harryp_peng 41 minutes ago [-]
Out of context: what is sex?
Is it physical satisfaction or romantic connection?
resolutebat 49 minutes ago [-]
You missed the end of the sentence:
> where you can have a whole lot more fun than you can at one of these strip clubs
"Fun" here being prostitution, I presume.
rayiner 41 minutes ago [-]
> literally had to explain to one of these girls how insane the price was
If that’s the going rate that’s the going rate. My plumber quoted me $17,000 in labor for something that was probably a days work for a team of two (and $5,000 in materials). That’s about $500-1,000 an hour. My dad was like “that’s insane for a plumber.” And I’m like “you told everyone to go to college and become baristas, so that’s what plumbers cost now.”
sgt101 26 minutes ago [-]
>Senior consultants that solve million dollars problems don't charge that much per hour.
I do.
howeyc 56 minutes ago [-]
I think it has more to do with OnlyFans.
ziddoap 46 minutes ago [-]
OnlyFans has been around since 2016. The entertainers in the article are talking about a steep decline in the past ~year.
wink 55 minutes ago [-]
As I have no idea what percentage of people frequent strip clubs, I'm mostly wondering if the sample size (and especially the demographic) is big enough to even be representative of anything.
Then again I'm not from the US and not generally visiting strip clubs. It's a topic that doesn't come up very often either.
btbuildem 29 minutes ago [-]
I don't think the percentage matters; it's the difference between money being and not being spent. It's not my scene, but I am guessing this correlates with highly disposable income -- people who make too much too easily so they can throw it away just as freely. If that stops flowing, I think it's a decent indicator of a general slow-down.
diamondap 2 hours ago [-]
There are more people struggling these days than the mainstream news reports. The lines at the food banks where I live are much longer than they were before COVID. One of the local food banks says they're distributing three times as many meals per month as they served before the pandemic. And this is an area of relatively high employment.
People working service jobs simply can't afford the basics, and that's a problem. Part of capitalism's implied promise is that if you work full time, you should be able to feed and house yourself. But for huge numbers of people, that doesn't seem to be true anymore.
hollywood_court 50 minutes ago [-]
It's really getting out of hand. I see it here with my coworkers in our small company. There are only 6 employees here total. 3 of my coworkers commute for 1hr+ away each way because they can't afford to live in our town. And then they don't eat. With their work schedule and their commute they're gone from home for 12hrs or more per day so they can't meal prep. And they can't afford to dine out. So they simply don't eat breakfast or lunch.
I told my CEO that my past success and my wife are effectively subsidizing his company. Because I could not afford to work here it I had not been so successful earlier and if my wife didn't have a great job with great benefits. In fact, I'm seriously considering leaving my role when the summer starts because childcare for my 5 year old son is going to cost ~55% of my net pay each month.
But my CEO and his family of 4 have been to Disney World twice since October 2023. And they're going to Europe for 2 weeks this summer.
saalweachter 31 minutes ago [-]
I feel like the owner/operator of a six-person company styling themselves the "CEO" is symbolic of something, somehow.
hollywood_court 14 minutes ago [-]
Definitely. And his wife is the "Executive Assistant" although I've only seen her in the office 4-5 times since I started in October.
> The lines at the food banks where I live are much longer than they were before COVID.
what does this really mean? Like food is so cheap we are obese. So does this mean more people want freebies? Tasty brand name foods? My neighbor thought we were poor and gave us food they got from a foodbank, it was really nice (but odd) stuff.
In 2024 I can't really understand using food as a measurement. There is too much.
btbuildem 16 minutes ago [-]
Well, if you can't understand, why such strong opinions?
Read up about basics of nutrition, about how poverty and obesity are correlated, what "food deserts" are, the differences between processed and healthy foods, etc.
cpursley 1 hours ago [-]
I don’t think I’d define the situation we’re in as capitalism.
rsynnott 2 hours ago [-]
This is a weirdly common type of article; given that the long-prophesied US recession remains stubbornly absent by any normal metrics, people just make up new ones to claim that there is a recession.
> Many quirky (and weirdly accurate) economic indicators help forecast the economy. For example, if an AFC team wins the Superbowl, the stock market will decline the following year. While there doesn’t seem to be a direct explainable connection, this has an accuracy rate of 73%.
Oh, ffs. I have serious questions about the accuracy of this website's domain name.
TechnicalVault 2 hours ago [-]
People confuse a economic recession with what is happening because of how words sometimes change their meaning away from their technical to a more colloquial interpretation. The economy as a whole is doing well, but people aren't because of inflation. Recession is just the word they've learnt to interpret as "I'm feeling poorer".
And the stripper index is down because their market is oversaturated aka "onlyfans overload".
ziddoap 41 minutes ago [-]
>And the stripper index is down because their market is oversaturated aka "onlyfans overload".
The article talks about a steep decline in the past ~year / post-covid. OnlyFans has been around since 2016. They are also fairly distinct. Not sure you can pin it all on OF.
ethbr1 1 hours ago [-]
Imho, inflation has a lot less to do with the perception than bimodal income separation.
Either you're "fine" or you're very much not fine.
Which is why you get people talking past each other.
itsoktocry 50 minutes ago [-]
>given that the long-prophesied US recession remains stubbornly absent by any normal metrics, people just make up new ones to claim that there is a recession.
So are you of the mind that we'll never see a recession again, or...?
The point is prediction. Once the "normal metrics" are in the tank (because they are lagging indicators), we are already in recession.
grobgambit 1 hours ago [-]
If the economy is bad people seem to enjoy news articles about how things are going to get worse and if the economy is good people seem to enjoy news articles about how things are just about to crash.
droopyEyelids 2 hours ago [-]
Wonder how a recession will affect the election
viraptor 49 minutes ago [-]
Most likely negatively for the current president. Regardless of actual policies, there will be lots of people associating the beginning of the recession with whoever has the role at the time. Few consider what the baseline of inaction would be.
Rendered at 13:47:59 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
The personal savings rate, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT, might be a better proxy of whatever the stripper index is actually signaling. It was at a low in the summer of 2022 and is nearing a low again. Less money in savings means less money to spend at strip clubs. It doesn't, however, automatically mean recession.
It's just blew my mind. I'm not sure what the house take is but $500 for a private dance for an hour was insane. Senior consultants that solve million dollars problems don't charge that much per hour. I literally had to explain to one of these girls how insane the price was. Because for $500 from the USA if you live near any major airport hub you take a long weekend trip to several Central and South American countries where you can have a whole lot more fun than you can at one of these strip clubs, and you're all in for $500. If that's your chosen form of entertainment, it literally makes no economic sense to spend any money at these strip clubs.
I think at one time using a stripper index as a proxy for a recession measurement would have been good. Nowadays I don't think that's a valid way. Too much has changed across the sex entertainment industry, and the attitudes of the customers have also changed because even if all you want to see is girls dancing there's better value for your money with the other options that are available. Many of those options you don't even have to leave your house.
Maybe a better proxy for a recession measurement would be something like top golf earnings. Or some other discretionary entertainment place similar to that. Are people going on outings spending their discretionary income in that way or are they saving it or did they just not have it to spend.
1) Maximum City is a book about various people in Mumbai around ~2000. One of them is a sort of stripper (she dances and sometimes dates in a transactional way; I don't remember how explicit it all is). Her analysis is that her clients are partially paying for her but more so for "winning" her over the other clients. The point isn't that one of them takes her shopping and gets to watch her choose handbags; the point is that nobody else gets to go.
2) I read a long article about economic strategies behind webcam shows (by a performer, maybe by Aella?) and the author made two points that I remember: one, it's good to have a stupidly high priced item that a whale can roll in and buy. Two, she had success having a high priced item that "saved" her, e.g., if you pay $X I won't have to eat this gross thing I made. Neither one of these is really about the thing, it's about the feeling of out-competing the other guys there.
So while you're $500 example makes sense if somebody is just looking for the dance (or whatever) itself, it doesn't make sense if that person actually wants to "win" over the other patrons (and doesn't view the poorer patrons in the poorer country as real competitors).
The stripper index makes sense when they were servicing a need no one else could. But the rise of OnlyFans means that at least some of the money that would have gone to strippers is going to performers on OnlyFans.
That's the issue with the Stripper index, is that it's vibes based because we can't actually measure how much the industry earned. If we listened to how people felt America should have been through 4 recessions in the last 3 years.
If not did you goto one of the top strip clubs in America? that sounds insane. Haven't been to a strip club in a real long time myself tho (absolutely don't have the income nor desire).
I think top golf is an interesting metric; I'd be concerned about linking it to two things so addictive - golf addicts and alcohol consumtion. But with the prices at top golf and how much the drinks cost it's probably a good indicator of the sector.
One of the downsides of it might be it only targetting people in upper income brackets (golf is an expensive game per se, def not as everyman and top golf isn't really accessible).
Then again I can't think of any metric that wont be "inflated" by more well off people consuming something cheaper and less well off people having to use another option (aka mcdonalds).
The price was ridiculous, I don't recall exactly, and I declined, saying I would just leave, and the dancer said in a Russian accent, if I did, she would tell security that I robbed her, since we already entered VIP. I think I paid her like $60 in front of the security guard and walked out. Definitely got mob/extortion vibes from the whole experience.
In this example, at least the $50 per 3 minutes or whatever it was, wasn't for anything 'extra' as the VIP area was wide open with no walls, all the victims able to see exactly how scammed everyone was getting.
I'm sure she loved that.
>Maybe people are just fed up with it and spending their discretionary income in other ways.
My friend, paying for "sex" will be one of the last things to go.
>Because for $500 from the USA if you live near any major airport hub you take a long weekend trip to several Central and South American countries
Do you think these are substitutes?
Depends on the strip club prices in those countries I guess.
> where you can have a whole lot more fun than you can at one of these strip clubs
"Fun" here being prostitution, I presume.
If that’s the going rate that’s the going rate. My plumber quoted me $17,000 in labor for something that was probably a days work for a team of two (and $5,000 in materials). That’s about $500-1,000 an hour. My dad was like “that’s insane for a plumber.” And I’m like “you told everyone to go to college and become baristas, so that’s what plumbers cost now.”
I do.
Then again I'm not from the US and not generally visiting strip clubs. It's a topic that doesn't come up very often either.
People working service jobs simply can't afford the basics, and that's a problem. Part of capitalism's implied promise is that if you work full time, you should be able to feed and house yourself. But for huge numbers of people, that doesn't seem to be true anymore.
I told my CEO that my past success and my wife are effectively subsidizing his company. Because I could not afford to work here it I had not been so successful earlier and if my wife didn't have a great job with great benefits. In fact, I'm seriously considering leaving my role when the summer starts because childcare for my 5 year old son is going to cost ~55% of my net pay each month.
But my CEO and his family of 4 have been to Disney World twice since October 2023. And they're going to Europe for 2 weeks this summer.
what does this really mean? Like food is so cheap we are obese. So does this mean more people want freebies? Tasty brand name foods? My neighbor thought we were poor and gave us food they got from a foodbank, it was really nice (but odd) stuff.
In 2024 I can't really understand using food as a measurement. There is too much.
Read up about basics of nutrition, about how poverty and obesity are correlated, what "food deserts" are, the differences between processed and healthy foods, etc.
> Many quirky (and weirdly accurate) economic indicators help forecast the economy. For example, if an AFC team wins the Superbowl, the stock market will decline the following year. While there doesn’t seem to be a direct explainable connection, this has an accuracy rate of 73%.
Oh, ffs. I have serious questions about the accuracy of this website's domain name.
And the stripper index is down because their market is oversaturated aka "onlyfans overload".
The article talks about a steep decline in the past ~year / post-covid. OnlyFans has been around since 2016. They are also fairly distinct. Not sure you can pin it all on OF.
Either you're "fine" or you're very much not fine.
Which is why you get people talking past each other.
So are you of the mind that we'll never see a recession again, or...?
The point is prediction. Once the "normal metrics" are in the tank (because they are lagging indicators), we are already in recession.