The strip club owner’s opinion of the $15/hour minimum wage

“We don’t have enough strip malls, strip clubs, and traffic in Boston” is how I explained to interlocutors in Florida my rationale for spending two weeks in Ft. Lauderdale, right around the corner from Pure Platinum. I happened to be riding a shuttle bus back from the Miami Open with a strip club owner while looking at a news article about the $15 minimum wage being proposed around the U.S. How would that affect his business? “Anything that makes it tougher for an 18-year-old to get a regular job is great for us,” he said (apparently minimum age for a stripper in South Florida is 18), “because dancing is seldom a first career choice.” Wouldn’t he have to give dancers a pay raise to compete? “They’re independent contractors,” he noted, “but even they weren’t the decent ones are all getting more than $15/hour right now.” [Note that, as with everything else regarding employment in the U.S., this is the subject of litigation: example1; example2]

Wouldn’t his dancers earn a larger income by using their bodies to produce a child? “The 21-year-olds are not planning 18 years ahead,” he replied. “The blowjob pregnancy [followed by child support] is a great retirement plan for a dancer, but they don’t usually start down that road until they’re closer to 30.”

[He did have some non-dancer employees currently working for less than $15/hour, but their compensation was not a big percentage of total costs and he thought that he’d be able to eliminate some jobs by keeping only the most productive of the lowest-wage workers (the Costco approach).]

Here’s the waterfront Ft. Lauderdale home that our tour guide identified as belonging to the owner of the Pure Platinum club:

2016-04-07 11.04.52

Related:

  • Florida family law, which does provide for potentially unlimited child support profits, but only if a high-income defendant can be identified (the cash yield from obtaining custody of the child of a moderate-income defendant is only about half as large as in Massachusetts or New York)

6 thoughts on “The strip club owner’s opinion of the $15/hour minimum wage

  1. There got to be some law against stealing sperm from well to do individuals and then collecting support. Isn’t this a form of extortion?

    What can I advise my teenage son besides getting a vasectomy very early if he turns out to be a successful gen K adult?

  2. Picker –
    Use his own condoms and flush in toilet? Abstain until marriage? Cougars only?

  3. In Sammy Hagar’s biography he describes a scam that goes like this: Groupie threatens to have child and then sue for child support. She demands payment for abortion. However, she won’t provide any DNA sample. So the “father” is faced with choice of either paying her off or taking the risk that the baby is his.

  4. If more women are forced into adult entertainment by rising wages, the divorce industry would be devastated by more men getting satisfied without marriage. Americans would either never allow it or require single men to retain lawyers anyway, as part of an individual mandate.

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