The Stripper Index: An unorthodox recession measurement

Or it could be that people are just tipped out. I hadn&#x27;t been to a strip club in several years but I got dragged to one a few months back by a friend and I got to tell you the money that these girls wanted seem to astronomically high for the service that they were providing. Maybe people are just fed up with it and spending their discretionary income in other ways. The girls turn their nose up at a couple dollars on stage and are pushing for $500 private dances.<p>It&#x27;s just blew my mind. I&#x27;m not sure what the house take is but $500 for a private dance for an hour was insane. Senior consultants that solve million dollars problems don&#x27;t charge that much per hour. I literally had to explain to one of these girls how insane the price was. Because for $500 from the USA if you live near any major airport hub you take a long weekend trip to several Central and South American countries where you can have a whole lot more fun than you can at one of these strip clubs, and you&#x27;re all in for $500. If that&#x27;s your chosen form of entertainment, it literally makes no economic sense to spend any money at these strip clubs.<p>I think at one time using a stripper index as a proxy for a recession measurement would have been good. Nowadays I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s a valid way. Too much has changed across the sex entertainment industry, and the attitudes of the customers have also changed because even if all you want to see is girls dancing there&#x27;s better value for your money with the other options that are available. Many of those options you don&#x27;t even have to leave your house.<p>Maybe a better proxy for a recession measurement would be something like top golf earnings. Or some other discretionary entertainment place similar to that. Are people going on outings spending their discretionary income in that way or are they saving it or did they just not have it to spend.

I found a similar article from June of 2022 about the stripper index signaling a recession, so clearly it&#x27;s not a very good indicator. A stripper is typically a short-term career, so it wouldn&#x27;t make sense to rely on observations made over such a short period. Maybe things are just returning to normal after a boom, and none of the interviewed people were around pre-boom.<p>The personal savings rate, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;PSAVERT" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;PSAVERT</a>, might be a better proxy of whatever the stripper index is actually signaling. It was at a low in the summer of 2022 and is nearing a low again. Less money in savings means less money to spend at strip clubs. It doesn&#x27;t, however, automatically mean recession.

Between OnlyFans and a cultural shift in masculinity that makes paying for sexual attention more of an &quot;ick&quot; for many, this doesn&#x27;t seem like a very good economic indicator, <i>especially</i> today.

The media needs to report a more realistic inflation metric. Groceries are wildly expensive.

As I have no idea what percentage of people frequent strip clubs, I&#x27;m mostly wondering if the sample size (and especially the demographic) is big enough to even be representative of anything.<p>Then again I&#x27;m not from the US and not generally visiting strip clubs. It&#x27;s a topic that doesn&#x27;t come up very often either.

There are more people struggling these days than the mainstream news reports. The lines at the food banks where I live are much longer than they were before COVID. One of the local food banks says they&#x27;re distributing three times as many meals per month as they served before the pandemic. And this is an area of relatively high employment.<p>People working service jobs simply can&#x27;t afford the basics, and that&#x27;s a problem. Part of capitalism&#x27;s implied promise is that if you work full time, you should be able to feed and house yourself. But for huge numbers of people, that doesn&#x27;t seem to be true anymore.

I think it has more to do with OnlyFans.

So what&#x27;s driving the impeding recession? Shouldn&#x27;t the economy be on the up swing?

This is a weirdly common type of article; given that the long-prophesied US recession remains stubbornly absent by any normal metrics, people just make up new ones to claim that there is a recession.<p>&gt; Many quirky (and weirdly accurate) economic indicators help forecast the economy. For example, if an AFC team wins the Superbowl, the stock market will decline the following year. While there doesn’t seem to be a direct explainable connection, this has an accuracy rate of 73%.<p>Oh, ffs. I have serious questions about the accuracy of this website&#x27;s domain name.

Wonder how a recession will affect the election