The owner of Sheri’s Cabaret, 2580 S. Highland Drive, filed for Chapter 11 reorganization last month and has proposed to reorganize by temporarily lowering its mortgage payments to two banks.

Sheri’s generates $20,000 to $26,000 per week in gross income and that it has 17 employees.

The dancers are independent contractors, who pay the club to work there, so are not counted among the employees, or as part of the club’s operating expenses, but do contribute to the company’s gross income.

A long time ago when Downtown Las Vegas started dying in a major way, and the city was making all that noise about how Neonopolis was going to make everything better, a man that ran the topless joint put the problem in simple terms. He said that “if tits and beer won’t bring them in, nothing will.”

Now we have an abundance of take-em-off joints, a shortage of tourists and the unemployment rate is officially almost 13%. (If I recall correctly this number only counts people receiving unemployment)

The tourists who are left go primarily to the big joints and the strip club’s bread and butter, the blue collar worker with his freshly cashed paycheck, is gone for the time being.

Las Vegas lives off discretionary funds. People have to have extra money or credit to come here. Now more and more the money is spent on frivolous things like food or rent, and their credit cards are maxed with no more automatic increases in their credit line.

For what it’s worth:
I don’t know about the thousands of warm bodies CES is supposed to bring to town, but the big complaint about COMDEX was that the guys never left the convention, and when they did they were not only cheap, they were lousy tippers. So they while may have helped the hotel’s bottom line and made the politicians happy, but they never did much for the working stiffs. –I suspect this will be true for CES as well.
(The AVN on the other hand should help the strip clubs and the outcall dancers.)