more notes about stripclubs and sin taxes

After I finished throwing out a few details about the mandatory sin tax on stripclubs in Texas coming concurrent with an attempt to shut down all the ones in Houston, I thought of some other interesting secondary effects.

It is worth noting that something many strippers complain about– the cheapness of the customers– has curious economic side effects. That is to say, many guys in Houston clubs eat lunch at stripclubs precisely because they are cheaper than Hooters. And Hooters is the primary competition. Nudity loses its value for the subset of customers who are unhappy if they can’t feel they are putting one over somehow on the club and to a lesser extent the girls. So a mandatory cover charge would drive some guys to spend extra at Hooters because their cheap thrill was now about the same price and it was ‘mandatory’.

Regarding the situation with Houston trying to shut down its stripclubs– bikini bars are not under the sexually-oriented-business laws’ jurisdiction. This means that if the clubs in Houston all go bikini, they are now competing directly with Hooters. Additionally, because they wouldn’t technically be titty bars, they wouldn’t have to levy the sin-tax cover charge. And other cities would see 1/3 of the potential tax revenue not being paid while those clubs still did business as usual and they would be irate. Possibly someone would suggest applying the tax to any place where women dressed skimpily while serving drinks, which would kill the entire thing.

Houston is trying to shut down its stripclubs out of an urge to both punish girls for doing the work, punish men for visiting the establishments, and ‘help’ girls by removing that option for making money in a ‘degrading’ fashion. But the bikini-bar endrun around it all would leave all the extras and sex in place in clubs without incurring any penalty for the clubowners or the customers who evolved the situation in the first place.

As for the mandatory club charge, that is looking more and more like a way of stating that visiting a stripclub makes a guy a de facto rapist, so of course he oughta fund a rape crisis center with his dirty money. This last bit actually ties into my next post, conveniently enough. Yeigh.