elkton house

Hootenanny has just learned of the transfer in ownership of the Elkton House in Wall, South Dakota. Wall is a small town of about 700 semi-lost souls on the edge of the Badlands in South Dakota and the Elkton House is a beacon of hospitality and satisfying, well-prepared family food in a well appointed environment situated in the heart of the motel district just off the town's only boulevard. (And I mean motel, not hotel. There are no hotels in Wall. All of the rooms open onto the parking lot. Nonetheless, it's a hospitable town of accomplished and dedicated 'moteliers' and otherwise.)
What I've heard though is that the new ownership of the Elkton House is contemplating the establishment of a 'gentleman's club'. Yes, they want to turn it into a titty bar. A gosh darned titty bar. In Wall. Just up the street from the school I might add.
At this titty bar, they will of course hire dancers. That is what they will call them. They'll really be nickel and dime prostitutes from Arkansas, the Carolinas and Texas but they'll argue they're all just feeding a family or working towards that degree that will spring them from the stage fees that keep them tied up like slaves.
Leaving aside the community issues (because ultimately, this idea will fail on that level and become fodder for lawyers if pursued), let's consider the likelihood this would actually succeed as a business.
In Wall, as noted above, there are about 700 people wandering around. A large proportion of these are women and children. Another large proportion are males who are either family men or otherwise wouldn't be caught dead in a place like this in their hometown. That leaves you about 30 likely candidates most of whom would show up once just to have a look and would never come back. Now you're down to to three or four. The pariahs. The untouchables. Wall's version of a ghetto crackhead. If there were enough of them, I'd say go ahead, you can't lose with those guys. But the dancers don't work for spare change only so we're back to square one. Pardon the French but we're talking skanks here. A small step up from a disease-ridden truck-stop lot lizard. Maybe. There's no real dancer money to be had in the eastern Pennington County market. Not legally anyways.
So does that mean your target audience is going to wind down to single male tourists of a "sporting" nature? (Are there a lot of those outside of Bangkok, Thailand?) In June you'll get a few custom harvesters but they work all day and into the night. In August, you'll spot some Hell's Angels, Outlaws and Bandidos due to Sturgis Bike Week. Guys from Phillip and Kadoka will round out your year and you might catch a few big-dollar, fat guys from the east coast in the area for deer hunting season in the fall. Slim pickings overall, I would guess, because even if you try to run this locally as a regular restaurant the rest of the time - no one will come. No one.
We should support business freedom and individual rights and a property owner's right to present a tax-based business model with adequate community support. But, most of all, we should support the community's right to reject it based on sound home-based reasoning and accepted community standards. It's called zoning. They ought to zone this idea and these crackpot owners right out of town.
Perhaps they'd do as well or better in Quinn or Wasta. Hell, when Tim owned the Wasta Bar, the last time I was there, there was a saddled horse in the bar before 10:00 PM. I'd pay more for that than a worn out idea.