Adventures in strip club transportation

Are Tampa drivers getting cheated, are we still getting $5 pre passinger

In Thursday's Los Angeles Times, Ashley Powers wrote about the latest round of complaints and litigation involving the kickbacks that nudie bars pay to taxi drivers for delivering passengers.

Often this money is immediately recouped by the club thanks to the cover charge paid by the customers. Therefore, in addition to paying your taxi driver for the ride to the club, as a tourist, you are also indirectly paying the bounty for delivering you to the club to the taxi driver.

I have always found this practice despicable and have written frequently about it on the Buffet. My recommendation for tourists remains to ask to be delivered across the street from whatever nudie bar you want to go to unless the taxi driver waves the meter charge.

Even a low-paying, $20-a-head club will pay the driver more than the meter in almost every case. And because the bounty is per-customer, if three people are in the cab that represents big money to the cab driver.

Periodically, some of the clubs will start paying more than the traditional $20-per-customer delivery charge, and that is when this issue explodes. This may be one of those times.

That is at least the allegation in a lawsuit covered by Powers, whose story includes an interview with a lawyer for Deja Vu as well as allegations about the latest bounty numbers. This from Power's story:
'The clubs are being shaken down,' groused Neil Beller, an attorney for Deja Vu Showgirls and Little Darlings, which recently sued rivals that pay cabbies more. A hearing on a defendant motion to dismiss the case is scheduled for March. ... Beard said paying the cabbies $20 a passenger hasn't been enough to compete for a dwindling pool of customers. Some places are paying $70.
The worry is that the taxi drivers will run down the clubs that pay less and steer customers to the clubs that pay more. So as a test, my friend L. and I drove to the Hard Rock last night to see what would happen when we, like tourists, tried to take a taxi to Deja Vu.

The first interesting thing to happen to us is that even though we were in the taxi line when we told the Hard Rock's doorman where we wanted to go, he pulled us out of that line and told us -- not asked but told us -- to go with a limousine driver without any further explanation.

The limousine driver also ordered us along with "Come on, guys." Two taxi drivers later explained to me that, unlike taxi drivers, limousine drivers pay doormen part of the strip club bounty to divert strip club customers to them. I have also been told strip clubs will pay a bigger bounty on customers who arrive by limousine. And although I can't say for sure why I was pulled from the taxi line and steered to a limo, I know that is exactly what happened. When I demanded an explanation before getting into the limousine of what was going on in terms of asking for a taxi and being placed in a limousine, the limo driver walked away from us and the Hard Rock doorman put us in a taxi, refusing further comment.

The taxi driver, by the way, did not badmouth Showgirls, but took us there directly and honestly. However, after I paid and tipped him well ($11.10 ride for which I gave him $15 and asked for no change) there was some commotion when L. and I told the doormen at Deja Vu and the taxi driver we were not going into the club but only wanted the ride there.

After a few moments of confusion and the two of them not accepting that explanation -- and trying to tell me I did not understand that I needed to just go into the club and check it out (my friend L. is a woman, by the way) -- they yielded to the inevitable.

We were not going inside to pay any cover to resolve whatever problem was caused by our arrival. We paid for a taxi ride and had no further involvement with their payment issues.

Moments later, L. and I got another taxi for the trip back to the Hard Rock. When I told the taxi driver I wanted to go to the Hard Rock, his first words were: "Don't you want to go to another strip club? This isn't a good club. Spearmint Rhino has a lot more girls and is the club in town to go to."

I insisted on a trip directly to the Hard Rock. And so ended our adventure in strip club transportation.