[QUOTE=Tomasb;2278735]I am curious whether or not it has ever been discussed if the fee negotiated between the punter and the girl for short or long time ends up partially back in the pocket of the bar owner? I sometimes wonder if these bars are charging the girl a flat fee of 500 bhat or some other amount from their proceeds. So if the girl is telling you her fee is say 3000 for short time, she is required to pay the bar owner a certain amount for the 'privelege' of leaving the bar. Of course, this is in addition to the bar fine we pay direct to the bar / mamasan...[/QUOTE]A few years ago (so keep in mind that things may have changed in the last few years), I asked a girl I was seeing semi-regularly about the economics of gogo bars. Here's what she said:
1. Girls get a flat salary, depending on their seniority and popularity. She was on 19,000 baht per month.
2. Girls are required to hit a certain number of bar fines per month. The exact number depends on the girl, so newbies start slow, but work their way up. She was an experienced one, and so her target number was 25. If she came in under that number, she had to pay the owner some amount for each missing bar fine. I can't remember how much, but I think it was 300 baht per missing BF.
3. They got 6 days off per month, but could buy each day out by paying their own BF. But they could only do so much of that before they got skunk-eye from mamasan, especially if they had not hit their monthly targets already.
4. Girls had to hit a minimum number of LDs per month, depending on seniority. She was on 50 LDs per month. Again, for each LD they are short, they owe the owner a certain amount. But they made 50 baht for each LD they sell. This of course incentivizes them to stay in the gogo bar to sell more LDs, or to do ST so they can rush back and sell more LDs.
5. Girls got to keep the entirety of the ST / LT fee. They were under no obligation to do ST or LT. That was up to them. But of course, the economics of it incentivizes ST, since a girl can do 3-4 STs in one night and just crank through to hit the minimum BF number. And that's what this girl did: she would work for 2 weeks, get something like 30-35 BFs (all ST, except with me. Or so she said. . .), 200-300 LDs, and then take 1-2 weeks off to be with her kid. She gladly paid the BF for the 1-2 weeks she took off, since she could afford it quite handily.
So doing the math. . . 19000 + (30 x 2000 baht, the then-ST rate =) 60000 + (200 x 50 baht for LDs =) 10000 = 89000 per month. That's rock-star money for a girl from Isaan, or for most Thai people, to be honest. And that doesn't include tips, or the I-take-care-you money from schmucks from abroad. She had regular Skype sessions each afternoon with three such gents. I wish I could have warned them, but I did not want to mess with her livelihood.
She did tell me, though, that the reason she worked at that particular gogo bar (Baccara, by the way) was because they had this particular structure. She said in other bars, girls had to kick back half of the payment for ST / LT, which she found overly exploitative. But keep in mind this is 3rd hand information (I. E. , she never worked in such an establishment), and this is a couple of years old. Maybe someone has more recent info.