If you’ve never eaten a buffet lunch at a strip club on a week day, you’ve never lived. Like any service establishment, strip clubs need to make money when the sun is up, so they do it by getting you in the door the old fashion way: Through your stomach. The food is usually pretty damn good! And cheep! And the scenery is, well, extra-jiggly, depending on proclivity for tips. It’s a lovely experience all around.
The hottest lunch spot in San Francisco right now — according to Forbes — is a strip club called the Gold Club in the South of Market district. Apparently it attracts legions of tech bros from offices near-by to dine on their all-you-can-eat lunch special. All you have to do is pay a $5 cover fee and the lunch itself is free. Not bad! The fried chicken looks pretty good, too! Especially considering that Chipotle burrito bowls are running $9 a pop these days.
The Gold Club is making bank these days, too. The club’s general manager tells Forbes they’re making between $15,000 – $20,000 during the day shift alone. And the appeal is more than just the Silicon Valley tech Brogrammer set, too.
Via Forbes:
The lunch buffet is its most successful campaign, having started at least a decade ago on Friday afternoons. While the event attracts all types–from construction workers to older men in suits and ties–a significant number of patrons come from the area’s countless startups and tech firms. Yelp, Optimizely and Salesforce are all within walking distance. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of people in San Francisco and San Mateo counties working in “computer systems design”–a good proxy for tech jobs–has increased by 76.1% to about 64,800 in the last four years. Private sector jobs in the area grew in that same period by only 22.6%. The management at the Gold Club said that it’s experienced an average of 20% annual growth in overall sales and attendance every year since 2011.
Adds one dude:
“People are stuck in offices all day staring at computer screens,” said another worker from a fast-growing tech firm who began going to the Gold Club in 2012. He also declined to be named because of the club’s taboo reputation. “Why not go eat at a buffet and see some girls with their clothes off at the same time?”
Hell yeah! That’s some logic we respect here at BroBible, where we’re glued to computer screens in a goddamn content factory all day too.
The strippers in the club itself are making mad bank too. For just three or four shift a week, one performer says she walked away with $1000 a week net, before fees and taxes:
The women who work at the Gold Club said that they can earn more there than at the city’s other establishments. One dancer named Olivia, who performed at the club for two years, said she makes around $1,000 a week performing between 11:30 a.m. and 7 p.m. three or four days a week. “I do love the Salesforce convention,” she said referring to Dreamforce, a conference that attracts some 135,000 people to the Moscone Convention Center, a short walk from the Gold Club. “Sometimes there is this stigma in the tech industry that there are nerds and they don’t know how to talk to women… But with Salesforce everyone is just amiable, fun and they spend money.”
Most women don’t stay there for long, however. Former dancers said that the average performer works for less than a year. Dancers are independent contractors who give the club about 20% of their daily earnings, excluding tips, to perform. Pay can vary day-to-day, said Tiffany, a former dancer who declined to give her real name because she may go back to work at the Gold Club. Tiffany was a former head of media sales at a prominent Bay Area tech firm who gave up her steady nine-to-five to strip because she said it looked fun and less stressful than her desk job. Prior to working at the Gold Club she took sales clients there for business meetings.
Hey — $600 gross for like 25 hours of work ain’t bad! Numbers like that add up over time.
Read more about the Gold Club over at Forbes. And if you’re ever in midtown Manhattan, hit up the $10 Rick’s Cabert lunch special. Just tell them that AZ from BroBible sent you.