Inflation Makes You Do What You Have To Do
The Las Vegas tourism slump continues and female Strip workers are looking to striptease off the Vegas Strip to make ends meet. Business Insider reports that the Crazy Horse 3 gentleman’s cabaret has seen a surge in first-time dancers auditioning. In December the club “had seen a 55% increase in nightly adult entertainer auditions compared to six months prior. There's also been an increase in women coming from traditional hospitality roles who are trying out dancing for the first time.”
MSN reports, “Las Vegas ended the year with the lowest number of visitors since the early 2000s, with a decline influenced largely by a sharp decline in Canadian visitors. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority recorded a total of 35.4 million visitors for the year, a decline of 7.4% from the previous year. Hotel occupancy rates averaged 80.7%, while convention attendance declined to 5.68 million.” In 2019, 42,523,700 people visited Las Vegas before a dip during the coronavirus pandemic, according to LCVA data posted on its website.
Crazy Horse 3 has open auditions seven days a week, and previously on slower nights. Louis Aceves, general acting manager of the club says he might see two to four, while now it's more like six to eight auditions a night. When a big event is coming, like the Consumer Electronics Show this month, it can be as many as 10 to 12 auditions in a couple of hours.
Aceves said the new people auditioning have been laid off from jobs at hotels or casinos, or have had their hours cut and want to make more money but need a flexible schedule.
Gina, told Business Insider “she was laid off in the summer of 2025 from her job as a VIP host at a high-end Vegas hotel after seven years. While going through her savings while trying to find another job, she decided to audition at Crazy Horse.”
"I was definitely nervous, but it was like, 'Okay, well what am I going to do?'" she said, adding she never thought adult entertainment was something she would do. "You have to figure it out."
Gina (her dancer name) said her casino host skills helped with her dancing. The work pays more than her previous job, and that there have been several times that she's made more money in a week than she made in a month at her old job.
Dancers are not employees but independent contractors thus she has more time and flexibility to pursue other things, like learning about digital marketing or becoming a yoga instructor.
After getting over the initial nerves, Gina said she's found the transition empowering. "This has taught me how to adapt even more and how to be resilient," she said.
In a 2018 piece for Mises.org “There’s No #metoo When Economies Collapse-You Do What You Have To Do,” I cited professor Paul Cantor’s seminal 1994 essay “Thomas Mann in Light of Austrian Economics”
“Hence to tamper with the basic money supply is to tamper with a community’s sense of value. By making money worthless, inflation threatens to undermine and dissolve all sense of value in a society.
“Thus Mann suggests a connection between inflation and nihilism. Perhaps in no society has nihilism ever been as prevalent an attitude as it was in Weimar Germany:”
In that 2018 piece, I wrote, “With shelves empty in Venezuela, women must either wait in line for hours to buy flour at prices set by the government or turn to the black market and pay many times more. Instead, a woman named Dayana, told the Herald she can make $50 to $100 a night as a prostitute, which she admits isn’t a good job, ‘But I’m thankful for it, because it’s allowing me to buy food and support my family.’”
Dancing in Las Vegas is not prostitution and the dollar has not collapsed, yet. But, watch this space.
