Whipped Cream Difficulties

More specifically, I guess I should have been a hand surgeon.

For those of you previously unfamiliar with the saga of Dr. Michael Brown, you can find a good introduction here.

The latest development? According to the HouChron, Dr. Brown was spending $60,000 a month on strippers (between, at least, December 2010 and August 2011).

Now, that sounds bad, but let’s think this through. An average month has 30 days, so that’s really just $2,000 a day. And according to the article, he was paying four strippers, so that’s really $500/day/stripper, which doesn’t sound too bad. (I guess, like everything else, strippers are cheaper when you buy in bulk.)

(Please forgive me for not linking to anything related to “Stacy Shey”, but, once again, my journalistic obligations have to take a back seat to the limitations imposed by writing these posts at work.)

Edited to add: Let’s give this some thought. Assume a construct called a “stripper-day” (similar to a “man-month“); that is, the equivalent of the “services” of one stripper for one “day”. We don’t have a clear idea from Dr. Brown of what a “day” constitutes, but I’m going to assume 8 hours; that gives each stripper a shift, plus a shift for a “backup” stripper. You know, just in case one of the primary strippers is on vacation, has a sick kid, or two strippers are needed for a proper game of Pinochle. (So one “stripper-day” = one stripper for 8 hours, two for 4 hours, 8 for an hour each, etc.)

So working on the $500/stripper-day figure and the assumptions above, we’re looking at an hourly rate of $62.50. Which doesn’t sound like bad money. Of course, we can assume the strippers are independent contractors, so their health insurance/retirement/work expenses (such as high heels) have to come out of that $62.50/hour. On the other hand, we can figure that the strippers are young and in good health, so their health insurance rates are probably low.

Question: would $62.50/hour be pretty much the standard going rate everywhere? I suspect that in NYC and LA the rate might be much higher; then again, in larger cities there may be more competition, which would tend to drive down rates.

Question: are strippers fungible? I suspect so, at least within a certain general subset of physical characteristics (some of which are under the stripper’s control, such as hair color and bust size).

This sounds like a subject for the Freakonomics guys.