The Great Las Vegas Titti Bar War
If Las Vegas were to change it's name it would have to change it to AMAZING Nevada. In the year of our lord 2004 thirty-eight million people made the trek to Las Vegas. The count is expected to be around forty or so million for 2005. This, in spite of great devastation in the south of America, the war that is going on and gasoline prices out of control.
It is said that if a person has a roof over their head and pocket change sitting around the house and a bank account that they are in the top 8% of the population of this planet. Then the people who come to LasVegas and spend thousands for a few days of entertainment and excitement must be in the top .05% of the population of this planet. What surprises me is that this supposedly top .05% of the population come to Vegas and they think they will win money. Eventhough they know that Las Vegas is the fastest or one of the fastest growing areas on this planet. How could the casinos give money away and continue to expand? There is something seriouly wrong with those two thoughts.
Actually, a person cannot win. Even if they win a jackpot that win will create changes in their personalities that will cause them to come back to get more money. That is how Las Vegas wins. They give many comps to people to get them back to the casino because they know that the winner has to come back to try their luck again and, most likely, will mortgage their house and bring that money back to Vegas.
Another facet that is hard to see is the amount of money that is spent on strip clubs. The guy goes into the club and has to pay an exorbitant amount to get in then the club charges them $8 to $10 for a beer. Most of the clubs require a two drink minimum. Some will go into the clubs and spend up to $4000 in one evening. They have to pay the girls $20 per dance to have the girl with bouncing boobs spend time with them.
If 5% of the thirty-eight million are guys who want to go to the strip clubs then that is an average of 1,900,000 who will spend at least $100 and up to the afore mentioned $4,000. That's between $190,000,000 and $7 billion six-hundred million spent on booze and the ladies.
Sometime in the past, and no one seems to know exactly when, one of the bright crayons in the box containing the strip club owners decided to get more business by offering the cab drivers a $2 pay for each customer that the driver brought to his club.
Naturally, when the other crayons saw this they decided to offer the same until one of them decided to offer $5 per customer. This was the genesis of the war.
The strip club owners have bid themselves into a corner where they are having a problem recovering the amount of the kickback from the customer. So, they decided to stop paying the drivers. Most of the owners have made millions with the strip clubs and were accustomed to being little lords of their empires.
The problem is that the drivers had grown accustomed to the extra pay. The Limo drivers and the hotel doormen also had become accustomed to pocketing hefty amounts of money from the kickbacks being paid the drivers. The cab drivers and limo drivers have a choice about where to take the customer because many times the customers get in the cab and say "Take us to a good strip club, we want to see some girls". If the club the customer wants to go to is not paying the drivers then the drivers will say something like, "That club is closed" or "Just gays go there now" or "The women there are fat and old". They will make up a story to get the customer to go to a club that pays the driver and if the customer insists on going then the driver says, "I don't go there, it is against my religion."
The club owners trying to stop paying the drivers has been replayed yearly and sometimes more than once a year. Recently, we saw the governor veto a bill that he had put together to reform the transportation offices because of underhanded legislative practices from one of the state senators.
Who are the players in the war? The cabdrivers, Limo drivers, hotel doormen, club owners and the local politicians. Others are affected by the war but these are the major players.
The Cabbies were accustomed to supplementing their incomes with an occasional ride to the strip club and some of the drivers who focused on finding strip club customers were deriving 45% of their income and more from this source.
Before the payoffs from the stripclubs started happening I would guess that there were maybe 80 Limos in vegas. I tried getting this information from the Transportation Services Authority. The TSA is the government agencey that governs Limos and towtrucks and maybe shuttle busess. They gave me the information on the phone and said that it would be on the website of the tsa very quickly but it never appeared. Probably quited down by the clubs. There were always 1 or 2 limos at the larger hotels and 10 to 15 at the airport. After the clubs started paying and the price for each customer delivered got to $20 and above the number of limos jumped to about 800 or so. All or most of them were in the business of taking the great paying rides from the cab lines at the hotels. This service was provided by the hotel doorman who received 50% of the kick back that the limo drivers were getting.
With December being the slowest month in the year and the cost of paying drivers up to $70 the clubs decided to stop paying all together. Some of the hotel doormen and the limo drivers had bought very expensive cars and homes and found themselves in a bind to pay for all of these luxuries.