Which Customers Should I Talk To?

“I bet you always get what you want,” Roger said with the playful glee of a child chiding their crush.

I spend a lot of time answering questions with smiles or some other non-verbal form of communication that neither confirms nor denies either answer. I could tell that Roger genuinely believed I had no problem coaxing whatever I might want from any poor sucker, himself included, but there was nothing further from the truth. I’ve been denied most of the things I’ve truly wanted in my life. I grew up poor and lonely, and every dollar I’ve made I’ve paid for with toil and tears. I thought this, silently as I mirrored Roger’s doting expression. I was going on a dark internal tangent, prompted by an utterly benign, rhetorical question.

“Nooo,” I cooed.

“Of course you do! All you have to do is bat those lashes and any man here would go broke for you.”

There’s something that a lot of customers say, and mean with deep admiration, but that I find to be a bit of a sneak-diss. They say, “You are so beautiful, to me.” It’s a line partially taken from a famous song, but there is an implicit, “You may not be beautiful to others.” It’s a fair and accurate analysis. Beauty is relative and intimately connected to cultural biases, personal experience, and all sorts of other variables. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say. To Roger, I was beautiful, and that was all that mattered for our successful transaction.

But how can you tell which customers at a strip club think you’re beautiful/hot? And, say they think you’re the baddest, how do you know whether they want to spend money on you or if they just expect to have access to your time for free? Strip clubs are not at all straightforward. Outside of the club, most femme presenting strippers have to constantly dodge a deluge of sexual advances from strangers anytime they leave the house. We can hardly cross a street without some creepy car pulling up beside us full of men trying to have a conversation no matter how busy the intersection. However, the strip club is nothing like normal life, and strippers must develop a variety of skills to avoid wasting their time and energy on clowns.

Because customers have to pay to play, they feel entitled to be choosy. This attitude is present across the service industry, particularly in occupations where tipping is involved. They interview us, as if we’re candidates for a highly sought after position, and some want us to go above and beyond, even beg. Customers want to feel desired, as if the stripper who has come up to them was drawn in like a sailor to some siren song, and like the sirens, some customers love dragging us to the depths of the metaphorical ocean, taking pleasure in our ruin. Some get a sick joy from picking apart our appearances or talking to us like imbeciles. For other customers, the experience of visiting a strip club is one of unavoidable pain: they know our attention is conditional, and that once the money disappears, so do we. The absolute agony tears them apart, rendering the whole interaction completely joyless because their anxious attachment keeps them fixated on the clock the entire time. And yet they linger, thirsting after strippers, wanting their attention nonetheless. Thankfully, not all customers are motivated by toxic fantasies. Some are easy, and will dance with whichever stripper is brave enough to introduce themself first. There are plenty of shy customers, overwhelmed by the awkwardness of being seen patronizing a strip club, who want nothing more than for a dancer to whisk them away and tell them what to do. The variety of customers and their motivations for popping in are endless, and yet as a stripper, you will need to learn to efficiently assess customers and economize your time.

First you’ll need to be able to identify if the customer is a lurker or a spender. Lurkers can be difficult to spot when you start at a new club. You may see a middle aged man in nice shoes, smiling at you and think he’s worth talking to, only to find yourself twenty minutes later without even a tip in your bag for your time. The best way to identify the lurkers is to make friends with a stripper who’s been working at the club for a while. Unfortunately, there are plenty of unfriendly strippers who will go out of their way to screw you over, but there are just as many nice dancers willing to shepherd in new dancers. One way to begin to suss out if a customer is a lurker is to invite them to the stage when the DJ calls you up to dance. Lurkers are inert. They tend to stay in the same spot all night, and seldom tip. If they do tip, it’s never astronomical, and oftentimes they’re creepy about it. They cling onto a single dollar until you look them in the eyes, or until they’re close enough to rub it on your body. If he clings to a dollar, he is broke or too stingy to be worth your time. There’s nothing grosser than having someone try to rub a single dollar bill on your body. Warnings aside, one of the best opportunities to ask for a dance is while you’re on stage. If someone is sitting on the tip rail, introduce yourself and say something like, “I’d love to take you for a dance after this.” There’s no shame in going over the dance prices in the middle of your set if you find a customer who’s interested (caveat: ***at most clubs*** I don’t know about clubs that don’t offer private dances). If you’re on stage and the crowd is too sheepish to sit at the tip rail with you, another useful strategy is to make eye contact with as many customers as possible. As you make eye contact, give each person a flirty smile, and see who smiles back. After your set, go talk to the tippers and the people who smiled back at you. Smiling can be awkward and arduous, especially if you aren’t feeling well, but a great stripper has a convincing fake smile. Sometimes people want to tip, but don’t want to get up to do it either out of laziness or because they’re self-conscious. If you go up to people after your set, you might find that you get additional tips. I like to go up to each of the customers who tipped me and thank them personally. This is another ideal opportunity to proposition them for a dance without having to settle in for a long conversation. Not all customers are interested in buying dances, but chances are, if you thank every person who tipped you or smiled back at you during your set, at least one person will want to purchase a dance.

Not all strippers dance on stage. Most baby strippers are forced to by management, but many older strippers or strippers with physical disabilities do not dance on stage. Stage dancing is just one ice breaker in your arsenal. Many of the interactions you facilitate on stage can happen on the floor just as well. If you’re sitting at the bar, or wherever, sizing up the crowd, try to make eye contact with customers and smile at them. If they smile back, wink, or do any other inviting gesture in return, they’re a good candidate to try. Like I’ve said a million times: keep these interactions brief. Lurkers can be the most friendly, engaging customers because they’re trying to compensate for not spending money. So, don’t get sucked into a drawn out conversation. The best way out of these time-waster conversations is to be honest. You have to work, you will get in trouble for not selling enough dances, and since the time-waster isn’t buying a dance, you need to leave to make your quota. It doesn’t even matter if you work at a club that doesn’t have quotas. If you have a personal daily goal, that is your quota. If you have a hands-off manager who doesn’t care if you make money or not, at the end of the day, you are your own manager and you will be upset if you don’t meet your goals. Customers may try to wear you down and tell you that if you stay just a few more minutes, then they’ll be ready to buy a dance. I always stick to my guns and reiterate that I have to make my quota, but that I’ll be more than happy to take them as soon as they’re ready.

While it can be worth it to put in the time to wear down a customer who you know will take you for an expensive dance, more often than not, it isn’t worth the risk if you aren’t certain. Additionally, I tend to avoid time suckers if there are other potential customers around. If I see four people dressed in business casual attire with decent haircuts, and that one customer I know I have to badger for an hour before he buys anything, I’ll try my luck with the other guys first. I’ve found that when I’m less available, otherwise slow-moving customers go out of their way to flag me down. They adjust their pace to match mine, which means less time wasted. If the club is empty, working a difficult customer is time well spent. There will always be scenarios where customers get jealous and dance with another stripper to get back at you, and it sucks, but it’s important not to take it personally. Whenever I see a time-waster customer buy a dance with another stripper to get back at me, I try to turn negative energy into rooting for the other stripper. I’m happy at least someone is taking that asshole’s money.

While there are many tips and tricks to navigating a club, you have to figure out your own unique formula for success. Some strippers make the majority of their income through persistence. They wear down unwilling customers, badgering them into submission. Other strippers refuse to go anywhere near a customer, and instead spend their entire shift dancing on stage at a safe distance. If the suggestions I’ve given don’t work for you, there are many other paths you can take to finding success.

I hope this guide will help some baby strippers figure out how to avoid the pain of wasted effort, but on the flip, the beauty of being a baby stripper is not knowing the full value of your time. Monetary success is totally relative. For me, it was going from counting change and cutting corners to being able to afford to eat out once a week and pay for a safe Uber ride home instead of taking a risk catching the bus. I was so excited and grateful. There are lots of strippers out there, including myself, offering calculated strategies to “reach your highest earning potential,” “six-figure-stripper,” or some other bullshit, but at the end of the day stripping is what you make of it. There is beauty in genuinely talking to customers and making friends with your coworkers, or seeing where the night might take you. It can be a dangerous adventure, but sometimes you discover unexpected worlds you’d otherwise be gate kept away from. The music from when I first began still brings me back to my first night at The Ritz and all the wonder I felt penetrating the underworld. While I’ve developed a less rose-colored perspective on everything, I’m still soft. I have customers who I love dearly, who I would get into a fist fight to protect. There are days when everyone is nameless and faceless, but that’s just one of the mechanisms of resilience. The other piece is maintaining humanity. Strippers are humans. Customers are humans. We are all vulnerable and dependent on a fragile system to survive.