Another 9-TEEN Massage

[vinapu]

7 hours ago, macaroni21 said:

...... and mamasan tip

what's that  ?

[vinapu]

7 hours ago, macaroni21 said:

 

From the bars, expect to pay for your drink, boy's drink, off fee and mamasan tip (total already 1500 or more) before you even leave the bar.

yes but chances, big chances are,  that in meantime you had 1-2 hours of fun. What kind of fun one has in massage venue's lobby ? Select, pay  and go to the room / cubicle, only then fun starts

[vinapu]

6 hours ago, macaroni21 said:

As Soi 6/Soi Tarntawan becomes more of a massage hub, there lies a business opportunity for the reinvention of The One. 

Rename itself The Big One. Remake itself into a massage parlour - you need only about 6-8 staff to make a go of it, unlike a bar that needs 15 boys to look interesting. 

Specialise in big, muscular boys doing massage.

 

genius ! if only somebody would hear

[vinapu]

1 hour ago, macaroni21 said:

Until some folks actually make their way to Silom Soi 19... and then wonder why there aren't massage parlours there.

( Or maybe there are, but staffed by middle aged women).

Won't be so hilarious to them.

who said life of stupid people is easy

[vinapu]

37 minutes ago, bkkmfj2648 said:

 

Then when I moved to Thailand - what I have observed is large groups of various Asian nationalities meandering the streets of Thailand either in large groups or in bus caravans with a tour guide.  Whereas, the Westerners that I observed were rarely in large groups or in bus caravans with a tour guide.

 

That has nothing to do with culture but is normal development of travelling habits. One  could observe it well when post -communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe started to be more affluent and people begin to travel en masse. First it were bus tours and all-inclusives and slowly but surely individual travel started to develop and flourish. 

[reader]

The 9-Teen Massage consortium is able to expand its reach primarily because it has investors with deep pockets and a strategy of how and how it wants to position itself going forward. As we all know, size has its advantages beyond the obvious and 9-Teen is the only exclusively male shop model in Silom-Surawong area.

Among the advantages are standardization in design, masseurs (only Thai masseurs) and ability to promote the band across multiple shops. They also get to easily move masseurs around their shops on Silom road, Soi 6 and Soi Tarntawan. 

If a customer doesn't indicate a preference, the job will go to the next guy in rotation. That's generally how all shops in the area operate.

Olivia's has more shops but it operates more like the mixed Surawong shops of Green and Avarin where foot and leg massages represent a lot of the workload.

I believe that the shop located adjacent to the old Tawan was known as Sun Massage. On the opposite side of Soi Tarntawan you would have found Indra Massage. Both have long since closed.

[reader]

Are the bars struggling? I can say with certainty that weekends are very busy for Goodboy and Freshboy. One member posted recently that he barely got seated at FB. Mid-week is understandably slower off-season but still drawing crowds to keep operations in the black. In high season, even weekdays can be quite busy.

As for lip-syncing LB's, there's only one bar (Hotmale) that comes to mind that doesn't include some in their acts. The other bars know that they're an attraction to most Asian customers and include at least a few in their performances.

[PeterRS]

2 hours ago, macaroni21 said:

Having spent much of my working life running around various businesses and countries in Asia, I have seen a lot of individualism.

Also, there are huge differences between the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Thais and Indonesians - countries I am quite familiar with. I would rather not homogenise any impression of them.

There are certainly major differences. I have spent 46 years now living in Asia, mostly in three specific countries but for part of that time with an Asia-wide remit for two relatively major companies. I made my remarks in respect of those visiting Thailand specifically for some form of nighttime entertainment and why gogo bars are generally not an Asian thing in comparison to spas, saunas and discos. And by collectivism I certainly do not in any way refer to entire countries. Merely 2 or more guys from one country visiting Thailand for a vacation.

[bkkmfj2648]

48 minutes ago, vinapu said:

That has nothing to do with culture

I have failed to make myself clear.  So, I need to tell a personal story which resolidified this collectivism belief into my brain by that former Chinese Malay boss.

Often here in Jomtien I eat alone - I am ok with that - no problem.  Of the 3 Thai boyfriends that I have had to date - they found this "eating alone" behavior strange.  All of them told me that in the Thai society to eat together as the collective is the ideal eating situation.  They also told me that during their child rearing years that when they were bad - they were disciplined by being forced to eat alone - to be forced away from the collective.

So, in my mind, this is a clear example of the preference for the collective over our Western comfort with the individual.

Did I miss something ?

[PeterRS]

17 minutes ago, bkkmfj2648 said:

So, in my mind, this is a clear example of the preference for the collective over our Western comfort with the individual.

Did I miss something ?

I do think the dining example is one that does not really illustrate the true sense of collectivism to which I was referring. As we all know, in many Asian cuisines (in fact almost all) it is tradition that several dishes are served during one meal, usually but not necessarily always all at once. Each individual at the table then chooses which dish they wish to sample first - and so on. There is no first course, pause, main course, pause, dessert etc. This is a time immemorial tradition. I suggest, though, this is not the reason that, for example, the Japanese and Koreans have an ingrained sense that the group is more important than the individual. That is a much larger societal/historical issue and not even related to the point I was trying to make earlier!

[macaroni21]

1 hour ago, vinapu said:

What kind of fun one has in massage venue's lobby ? Select, pay  and go to the room / cubicle, only then fun starts

True, the fun doesn't take place in the lobby, but how does lobby fun make it fun-nier? All sorts of interesting fun can be had in the room; they don't have to be vanilla.

Hey guys, suggest a price for each of these service items, where the orange boxes are.

[a-447]

3 hours ago, macaroni21 said:

The Thais and Indonesians incorporate social status considerations a lot into the way they speak. The others... not so much. 

 

Sorry, Mac, but I have to disagree with you here. 

The Japanese language has various levels of politeness and you have to be very careful to adjust your language to suit the social status of the person with whom you are talking.

This is why they use name cards. The name itself is not so important - it's the job title indicated on the card which matters. That tells you exactly what level of polite language you need to use.

[macaroni21]

On "collectivism", I think we are talking about different things at the same time (myself included), so let me try to make myself clearer.

In many societies outside of the West, a person's identity is strongly anchored to a group, usually a family group (but sometimes a religious group). It manifests itself in two easily visible ways: (1) the individual feels a strong responsibility to care for and support other members of the group, and we see this for example, in the priorities of some of the moneyboys vis-a-vis the financial demands of their families back home; (2) the individual's lack of responsibility to non-members of the group, and this manifests itself in behaviour that is unsympathetic to people who are different from them (racism, caste-consciousness) and also a general lack of responsibility towards the "commons", i.e. the shared public spaces (littering, rubbish dumping, even anti-social behaviour like noise).

In my mind, "collectivism" is not a good word for this difference in the way group identification and group loyalty manifest themselves. Nor is "individualism" as perceived by non-Western societies looking at the West, necessarily a good thing; they see in the West a certain selfishness in the lack of strong responsibility towards kin.

Strong group loyalty does not necessarily equate with groupthink or groupie behaviour. People can feel a strong loyalty and responsibility to a group and still have strong opinions of their own. That was what I was referring to in terms of my working life in various Asian countries. They don't tailor their views into groupthink, they don't make themselves mindlessly subservient, at least not any more than can happen in the West (witness MAGA groupies). They are quite capable of thinkng inependently, inventively and creatively, and also to cast aside traditional ideas - Japan, China and Korea would not have advanced as much as they have if their people did not have the capacity to think out of the box and overturn conventional ways of doing things.

In some language cultures, their way of speaking may mask the differences of opinion unless one is attuned to their speech patterns. For example, in different cultures, different meanings are assigned to "yes" (Japanese "Hai"), to the nodding of the head, to silence. Do you read "yes" as agreement? Do you read silence as consent?

[macaroni21]

20 minutes ago, a-447 said:

Sorry, Mac, but I have to disagree with you here. 

The Japanese language has various levels of politeness and you have to be very careful to adjust your language to suit the social status of the person with whom you are talking.

This is why they use name cards. The name itself is not so important - it's the job title indicated on the card which matters. That tells you exactly what level of polite language you need to use.

You are right. I had meant to include the Japanese among the Indonesians and Thais, but somehow left them out. The Koreans and Chinese are more straightforward. Even then, there have been occasions when my Chinese interpreter was flummoxed by the speaker using a literary or historical allusion when saying something. It was a round-about way of making a point, but unless the listener/interpreter was as well-versed in the literary classics or history, the cursive speech can be hard to interpret.

The point is, the culture of such a language allows for disagreement to be expressed in indirect ways, which can be very hard for an outsider to pick up. Everybody is smiling and saying nice things, but they are vigurously objecting to something.

[Raposa]

1 hour ago, reader said:

Are the bars struggling? I can say with certainty that weekends are very busy for Goodboy and Freshboy. One member posted recently that he barely got seated at FB. Mid-week is understandably slower off-season but still drawing crowds to keep operations in the black. In high season, even weekdays can be quite busy.

Even Moonlight had a lot of customers last two weekends. One of them was their anniversary weekend, but still… 

[macaroni21]

2 hours ago, vinapu said:

That has nothing to do with culture but is normal development of travelling habits. One  could observe it well when post -communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe started to be more affluent and people begin to travel en masse. First it were bus tours and all-inclusives and slowly but surely individual travel started to develop and flourish. 

I agree with @vinapu People choose to travel in groups for pragmatic reasons, and we should not be reading cultural innateness into such behaviour. Cost/economy has been mentioned by vinapu. But less obvious, yet equally powerful a factor, is linguistic comfort. Many westerners are able to speak English as a second or third language, and they can assume that in many countries that they would like to visit, such as Philippines, India or Jordan, there will be locals especially in the tourism-related places who will likewise speak English as a second or third language.

If you don't speak a single word of English you may suspect that it will be very daunting to try to travel alone. The more "heartlander" or less educated person from China, Vietnam or Japan will decide that the pragmatic value of travelling in the group to overcome language barriers is important. In addition to cost considerations. Also, without English or access to travel guides in their own language, even figuring out where the attractions are or how to get there by local transport will prove difficult. Best to leave it to a tour organiser.

As people in these countries get richer and better educated, with some grasp of English, they will become more independent. I see no shortage of independent travellers from China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan etc everywhere I go. Unsurprisingly, they tend to be younger, which correlates with education.

It's worthwhile looking at the flip side. How many Westerners visit the secondary and tertiary cities of China or India where very little English is spoken? Some do, and then find that the assumptions they made - that people in these hinterlands also would speak some English - are wrong. Even Google Translate does not work because the people speak with a heavy provincial accent. The signboards are all in Chinese. The roadnames are all in Chinese. The museum exhibits are only explained in Chinese.  In the deeper parts of China, I see packaged tourists from the West - the French, Germans, Italians, Spanish.... These travels are not cheap and these Europeans are middle-class or higher-income professionals. Yet, it still makes sense, for the same pragmatic reasons of language and information scarcity, for them to use a group tour.

You notice that when I speak of the tourists in the hinterlands of China, I didn't mention Americans. It may be just the luck of the draw, but my observation is that they are few and far between. If choosing to travel in groups signals a lack of confidence in the linguistic challenge of visiting another country, at least they visit. What does it say when they don't visit at all? It's below lack of confidence - is it a fear of encountering difference?

[jason1975]

58 minutes ago, macaroni21 said:

 

Hey guys, suggest a price for each of these service items, where the orange boxes are.

I will pay up to 500 baht for private flexing session!

[a-447]

I remember passing by I think it was 2 9-Teen massage places on my visit to Bangkok last year.

I spotted a gorgeous guy sitting outside. As I had just had sex I decided is come back later in the evening and grab him.

When I turned up, he was no longer there, so I chose another guy, only to be told they had a rotation system and that they would choose the masseur for me.

I didn't bother and never returned.

Sorry but if I'm paying, I'll choose.

[PeterRS]

1 hour ago, macaroni21 said:

Japan, China and Korea would not have advanced as much as they have if their people did not have the capacity to think out of the box and overturn conventional ways of doing things.

I have worked in Japan - albeit more than a few years ago and I accept things have changed a bit since then - and also in China. But I absolutely cannot accept that the Japanese economy is so advanced because their people have the capacity to think out of the box. I was in the offices of so many Japanese  businesses with dozens of Japanese sitting at identical small desk spaces overseen by managers or supervisors who usually had small individual offices with glass panels. I saw a great deal of paper pushing and very little actual thinking - and certainly not thinking out of the box. It was not the job of the average Japanese to think out of the box but to fulfil meticulously the mandates of their managers and ultimately their companies. That was certainly the situation in the company I worked for! Japan succeeded partly because of a host of visionary business leaders like Soichiro Honda, Konosuke Matsushita of Panasonic, Kiichiro Toyoda, founder of Toyota, Masayushi Son of Softbank, Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka who founded Sony, Satoru Iwata of Nintendo, and a host of younger leaders at the head of e-ommerce and video gaming industries, for example. Leadership within companies was and is top down with little if any room for thinking out of the box by those lower down the ladder.

Secondly, the unique Japanese concept of the keiretsu. These are huge business groupings that link banks, trading companies and industrialists through ownership, cross stock holdings and long-standing exclusive relationships. There is no doubt that in the west these would be regarded as cartels and broken up. In Japan they are both permitted and encouraged by the government. It was their very size that gave them the financial strength and the connections to grow quickly, aggressively gaining market share. This resulted in great competitiveness both nationally and internationally.

Thirdly, businesses had access to a huge pool of domestic household savings, far greater than in the EU or the USA.

On the other hand, from virtully the first time I visited China and started looking seriously at businesses, I saw there was a much greater level of individual responsibility in many offices. I quickly came to the conclusion that partly because of this, China would surely grow faster than Japan. And that proved true, at least in the 1990s/2000s when Japan entered into a major economic recession which no attempts enabled the country to start growing again. China in those years, admittedly with assitance from a welcoming west, grew at a staggeringly high rate. Today I would have no hesitation in putting money into China rather than Japan, if only because Chinese generally have a greater entrepreneurial spirit than their Japanese counterparts.

I have not worked in Korea but from various visits over the years I believe it is much more in tune with the Japanese way of business than China.

All that said, having to devote oneself to a company and its company-think, individual Japanese obviously have greater freedom to make up their own minds outisde of work. But as in Korea, for the vast majority of the citizens societal and historical forces still render this difficult for most.

[khaolakguy]

47 minutes ago, a-447 said:

I remember passing by I think it was 2 9-Teen massage places on my visit to Bangkok last year.

I spotted a gorgeous guy sitting outside. As I had just had sex I decided is come back later in the evening and grab him.

When I turned up, he was no longer there, so I chose another guy, only to be told they had a rotation system and that they would choose the masseur for me.

I didn't bother and never returned.

Sorry but if I'm paying, I'll choose.

The proliferation of 9-Teen shops is strange. I had the reverse experience in the Silom branch a couple of years ago. I asked to choose the masseur and the manager agreed. But in the room the masseur had no interest in removing any clothing at any point or providing any kind of HE! 

I haven't been back since since. If I want a no extras massage in that area I would go to Prime for a better and cheaper service. I have rarely, if ever, read good reports of the service there from any of our intrepid reporters, but they are presumably receiving sufficient customers(of some type) to justify the expansion.

 

[Marc in Calif]

8 hours ago, Raposa said:

hmm seems you can now book masseurs directly with the shop. 

Of the guys they have I would recommend Mr. Tan (hunky, vers but not pictured below.) He has got experience from Ssense, the Adam and Men Club in Sukhumvit.

 

Great photo!

The masseurs are men rather than little boys. 🙃

[vinapu]

11 hours ago, Raposa said:

Even Moonlight had a lot of customers last two weekends. One of them was their anniversary weekend, but still… 

any new faces there?

[a-447]

10 hours ago, PeterRS said:

But I absolutely cannot accept that the Japanese economy is so advanced because their people have the capacity to think out of the box. I was in the offices of so many Japanese  businesses with dozens of Japanese sitting at identical small desk spaces overseen by managers or supervisors who usually had small individual offices with glass panels. I saw a great deal of paper pushing and very little actual thinking - and certainly not thinking out of the box. It was not the job of the average Japanese to think out of the box but to fulfil meticulously the mandates of their managers and ultimately their companies.

Yes, Peter. You're spot on.
 

At school we never asked questions; we sat there and absorbed what was being taught. We were never asked our opinions or to look at a problem and analyse it. All analysis was done by someone else.  We were specifically taught not to think, but to follow. There was certainly no chance to think out of the box, as the lid was shut tight.

Young people today are pushing back, but I think this is only during the short time between school graduation and when they finish university. As soon as they enter a company, they are dragged back into the system.

You can see this lack of thinking and decision-making in action every day in Japan.

The daughter of a friend is a high school teacher in Tokyo. I visited her school to give a talk to her class and afterwards I wandered around the gym during a sports lesson. 

Four kids were playing badminton. I asked if I could have a go and got the typical response - they held a meeting trying to decide what to do! Eventually, one of them approached me and politely refused. It's because they had to ask their teacher what to do, and she was nowhere to be seen.

The same happens if you go to a restaurant and make a small change to the menu.
 

Individual desserts were listed on a menu in a coffee shop. I ordered a piece of cake and asked for a scoop of icecream on top. As expected, the waitress was taken aback and didn't know how to reply. Here's a customer not sticking to the rules!  She went back to the counter, had a meeting with the staff and then came back and told me I'd have to order the icecream separately.

So I did. And when she brought my order to my table I picked up the bowl and tipped the icecream onto my cake!

"See? This is how it's done," I said with a smile.

But the lack of decision-making ability and thinking out of the box was there for all to see during the earthquake of 1995. Teams of rescuers with sniffer dogs arrived from various countries but were held up for a day at the airport, wasting precious time, because nobody would make the decision about what to do with the dogs! Had it been a western country I'm sure Quarantine would have said, just get the dogs down to the disaster area so they can do their job - paperwork can come later. But there was nobody in authority at the airport willing to make that decision by himself. Numerous meetings would have been held before the decision to release the dogs was finally made.

[bkkmfj2648]

45 minutes ago, a-447 said:

The same happens if you go to a restaurant and make a small change to the menu.
 

Individual desserts were listed on a menu in a coffee shop. I ordered a piece of cake and asked for a scoop of icecream on top. As expected, the waitress was taken aback and didn't know how to reply. Here's a customer not sticking to the rules!  She went back to the counter, had a meeting with the staff and then came back and told me I'd have to order the icecream separately.

So I did. And when she brought my order to my table I picked up the bowl and tipped the icecream onto my cake!

"See? This is how it's done," I said with a smile.

Excellent post @a-447. 

Earlier this month I returned from 62 days in the Philippines - mainly in the Cebu metropolitan area.

I had a similar experience but with a cheeseburger.  I ordered a cheeseburger and the waiter took my order and brought my request to the chef.  He returned sheepishly to tell me that the cheeseburger is not available today because there is no cheese.  So, I asked if I could substitute the cheese for something else and I was told - oh no sir, the chef has strict rules that he can only prepare the meal according to the approved plan.  I asked, is the person who approved the plan for the cheeseburger here?  He replied, oh no sir, that team is over in corporate in Manila.  The only concession that I could get was to have my cheeseburger downgraded to a normal hamburger - which I accepted.

As I was with my adorable Mr. B, my local Filipino tour guide, I told him that I would run across the street to 7-Eleven to buy some cheese to put on my to-be delivered hamburger.  A look of horror came over his face and he pleaded with me not to to this and to create shame to the pre-approved system.  So, to keep happiness and harmony I declined to go to the nearby 7-Eleven.

After 62 days in the Philippines I see a STRONG parallel with the Japanese indoctrination process that you wrote about in your above post.  The result on the Philippine nation is that nobody will take charge of a situation and/or improvise - as it is not allowed.  Mr. B. told me that Philippine employees can be fired and/or punished (wages are garnished and they are sent home without pay) if they do not follow the pre-approved (often rigid and inflexible) scripts - which are prepared by managers who also cannot think outside of the box.

And this was not the only incident during those 62 days - a more serious incident, which I reported in my Cebu trip report here - relates to a self-inflicted incident created by a Metro Department staff strictly abiding by a poorly written managerial script, which went off of the rails, because nobody was allowed to think out of the box...

[10tazione]

4 hours ago, a-447 said:

Yes, Peter. You're spot on.
 

At school we never asked questions; we sat there and absorbed what was being taught. We were never asked our opinions or to look at a problem and analyse it. All analysis was done by someone else.  We were specifically taught not to think, but to follow. There was certainly no chance to think out of the box, as the lid was shut tight.

Young people today are pushing back, but I think this is only during the short time between school graduation and when they finish university. As soon as they enter a company, they are dragged back into the system.

You can see this lack of thinking and decision-making in action every day in Japan.

The daughter of a friend is a high school teacher in Tokyo. I visited her school to give a talk to her class and afterwards I wandered around the gym during a sports lesson. 

Four kids were playing badminton. I asked if I could have a go and got the typical response - they held a meeting trying to decide what to do! Eventually, one of them approached me and politely refused. It's because they had to ask their teacher what to do, and she was nowhere to be seen.

The same happens if you go to a restaurant and make a small change to the menu.
 

Individual desserts were listed on a menu in a coffee shop. I ordered a piece of cake and asked for a scoop of icecream on top. As expected, the waitress was taken aback and didn't know how to reply. Here's a customer not sticking to the rules!  She went back to the counter, had a meeting with the staff and then came back and told me I'd have to order the icecream separately.

So I did. And when she brought my order to my table I picked up the bowl and tipped the icecream onto my cake!

"See? This is how it's done," I said with a smile.

But the lack of decision-making ability and thinking out of the box was there for all to see during the earthquake of 1995. Teams of rescuers with sniffer dogs arrived from various countries but were held up for a day at the airport, wasting precious time, because nobody would make the decision about what to do with the dogs! Had it been a western country I'm sure Quarantine would have said, just get the dogs down to the disaster area so they can do their job - paperwork can come later. But there was nobody in authority at the airport willing to make that decision by himself. Numerous meetings would have been held before the decision to release the dogs was finally made.

This raises the question: How can a country with such customs ever make progress in any area, let's take science or inventions for example? Any idea?