It’s a Saturday night, and you’ve been bobbing to Glitter by Benee for the past three hours in Suburbia. It’s been a good night but you’re ready to call it quits and shelve some kebabs before passing out in your best mate’s bed. The issue is that you have to survive the walk back to North Dunedin first. You’re wearing a bralette, denim skirt and not much else. What follows is the most miserable half-hour of your life. This is a sordid tale that many of us know every weekend. But what if there was another way?
The idea that the freezing cold forever-Winter that is Dunedin doesn’t have cloakrooms in clubs is archaic, barbaric, and simply inhumane. In case you haven’t heard of the concept, cloakrooms are a place in clubs where you can store your coat and a bag, sometimes for free, sometimes for a couple of dollars, and is a thing almost everywhere else on the planet. My God I’m so fucking angry about this. Dunedin is a very, very cold place. What this means is that we are forced to either wear a coat to town and just awkwardly hold it whilst dancing, stash it somewhere and pray nothing gets nicked, or don’t wear a coat and freeze your arse off on the walk back. All are equally bad options. But what if we …changed that? Hehe. Cloakrooms are universally good for everyone. The biggest win-win of all time since dumpling trucks started parking on campus.
Cloakrooms are an inherent good because:
- The walk back from town no longer becomes an excruciatingly painful and bitter experience. Literally I cannot emphasise how much of a massive thing this would be. The flow-on effects from this alone are huge. Fewer colds and flus. Less money spent at Maccas as a reprieve from the outdoors. Your entire life will be measurably improved.
- You’re less likely to engage in risky behaviour like drunk driving or talking to that shit guy just to steal his flannel shirt.
- Being able to carry around a bag is unbelievably handy. You can put in pepper spray, a sandwich, a hat, another sandwich because the first one was delicious. Having to limit your carried possessions down to some house-keys and a phone always, in some small way, leads to inevitable disaster.
- Coats are cute. Everyone becomes 100% more attractive in coats.
- If you already take coats to town, you no longer have to worry about theft by leaving your coat under a chair. You no longer have to live in fear. It’s okay.
Cloakrooms are good for club owners because:
- If you charge for them you get money. Profits, capitalism, blah. For the purposes of my argument, I’m going to assume that profit is all club owners care about.
- If someone goes through the effort of checking in a coat (either through paying for it, waiting in a line or just sheer physical exertion), they’re more likely to stay in a club longer to make the whole experience worth it. You’re not going to club hop if you just checked in a coat 5 minutes ago. That would be sheer madness. The longer someone stays in a club, the more likely they are to buy drinks, again leading to profits.
- Students probably maybe won’t preload as much, maybe, because the need for an impenetrable alcohol blanket has significantly lessened. Everyone knows that the chilling wind knocks about three standards off you, so you wildly overcompensate. Sure, the causes behind pre-drinking culture are much more nuanced than this, but like… just give me this. I’m writing an opinion piece about cloakrooms, I clearly don’t have much going in my life right now. Anyway, if there’s less pre-drinking, that means less shit behaviour outside towards bouncers and more money spending inside.
- People are just more likely to go clubbing if the walk is more bearable. 99% of the time the reason I pussy out on going to town is because it’s cold and I’m a little bitch. More club-goers, more cha-ching, babey.
Basically, WE SHOULD HAVE CLOAKROOMS. Demand this of your local clubs! Email your local politicians! Harass your OUSA representatives! We deserve to wear warm fluffy coats along George Street then comfortably strip off layers to reveal a sexy t-shirt underneath and dance-cry to Untouched by the Veronicas. We can start a revolution, one coat at a time. Please...I’m so cold.