Striptease restaurants have become part of the scenery - tax officials seldom see any of the cash made in tips
HS took a look at what happens in strip joints, and where the money goes
Two Finnish strippers fill in a crossword puzzle at a corner table in a Tampere restaurant. The foreign dancers sit in their own group. Every now and then, one of the dancers goes off and gives a show to the nearly-empty room.
As the night progresses into the early hours, in another bar across town things are a good deal less pedestrian. Here the strippers can barely get on the stage to strut their stuff, as customers throng around them all the time.
A boisterous bunch of males wants some female company for their table. They have to front up cash for it.
Nothing comes for nothing in a striptease bar.
This certainly became clear when Helsingin Sanomat went round the erotic restaurants in four Finnish cities to take a look at where all the money goes.
What is common to all the establishments is that the erotic dancers regularly step up on stage to take off their clothes in front of the punters.
All they are wearing by the end of the show is a pair of stilettos.
After the performance, the girls go around the audience collecting tips. A typical tip might be a five-euro note, stuffed into the waistband of the stripper’s panties.
If the table refuses to give a tip, the chances are it will generate a torrent of abuse rather than a winsome smile.
“What are you doing here, then?” one dancer hisses. “Very bad”, snaps another.
There is a perfectly sound reason for the hostility towards bad tippers.
Strippers do not usually receive anything much by way of a basic salary. This is not a profession with collective bargaining agreements, and the law does not stipulate a minimum wage for taking one’s clothes off.
In addition to the tips they collect for dancing in the buff, the strippers can earn by persuading customers to buy them drinks at prodigious prices.
The more expensive the drink, the longer the girls will stay at the customer’s table.
The cheapest so-called “Lady Drinks” generally cost EUR 20, but a surprising number of tables seemed to have EUR 150 bottles of sparkling wine in ice-buckets.
The strippers also attempt to coax customers into buying a private show in a back room. These performances cost from EUR 40 up to more than EUR 100.
In the back room, a stripper who has done her thing can charge perhaps 15 euros as a "tip" for allowing the customer to fondle her breasts. Another charges EUR 30 for a spot of lap dancing.
Sex in striptease joints is not on the agenda, at least according to several of the customers, the dancers, and the clubs’ management.
“It would get out very quickly if it was happening, and the 'Closed' signs would go up like a shot. If a girl is turning tricks on the side, then she gets fired straightaway”, reported the owner of one striptease bar.
The income distribution between strippers and the restaurants where they work generally adheres to the same formula.
The dancers can keep all the tips they earn, including those gained from private performances. In addition they generally get a share of the revenue from drinks offered to them by customers and from the admission charges to back-room shows.
“When one looks at the returns posted by these restaurants, it is hard to ascertain exactly how the money is divided, and who gets what. We are in a kind of strange grey area here”, says Olavi Kärkkäinen, an inspector from the National Product Control Agency, a central office which operates under the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health and is responsible among other things for overseeing the implementation of the Alcohol Act.
Helsingin Sanomat observed how two women methodically cleaned out one seriously drunk male customer in an operation lasting several hours.
Every so often, the man shouted that he had no more money to spend on them. The women escorted him gently to the door and encouraged him to go to the nearest ATM for reinforcements.
He returned with more cash in his wallet.
The process was repeated a couple of times.
Before last orders were called, a 150-euro bottle of sec was brought to the table, and after that the women escorted the man to a show in a private room.
In the view of the restaurant owner, nothing untoward had taken place.
“What kind of fleecing is that supposed to be when the man buys the women some champagne? Nobody is forcing him to do it.”
According to the word in the trade, on the best nights strippers can earn thousands in tips.
Then again, on a quiet midweek evening their income can be a big round zero. The women do not breathe a word about their monthly income.
And this is where the tax officials start to frown.
The income of the strippers is taxable, including the takings from tips. According to Markku Hirvonen, the Ministry of Finance’s expert on the grey economy, very few strippers file a tax return on their earnings.
In many cases, says Olavi Kärkkäinen, what happens is that the dancers are categorised as entrepreneurs in the restaurants, with their own card for the inland revenue service's prepayment register, but when these details are examined a year or two down the road, it turns out that the tax authorities have no income whatsoever declared on which tax should have been paid.
Helsingin Sanomat
|
| 25.4.2008 - TODAY |
 Striptease restaurants have become part of the scenery - tax officials seldom see any of the cash made in tips |
|
