Human Traffic in Clubs and Re-Entry

Leaving a club to go outside whether for a smoke, to meet with someone, to get more money out or to make a quick phone call is an issue which plagues club managers and door staff every waking day. As a clubber the worst thing you can do it leave a club without proof that you were ever inside. The most long running way to ensure people that re-enter a club were really inside before has been to stamp the back of the hand.

Naturally other methods include handing out vouchers to those that head outside which must be handed back on re-entry but recently clubs has started getting cleverer. Being that its so easy to go out and buy your own hand stamp and fake the re-entry door personnel have started to mark the back of the hand with a magic marker or in ghost ink so that the symbol can only be seen under UV light. The bouncers all carry a small UV torch which when waved over the hand reveals the ghost ink underneath.

This still means that manual checking is intense and before long UK clubs are likely to introduce RFID tagging to its clubbers so that, like an unpaid item leaving a shop, alarm bells will ring if the entrant is indeed a stray. Writing this article in 2008, I have not yet come across the use of this technology in any clubs in the UK which means that now all you need to fake re-entry is take a magic marker out with you and get someone who does pay to get in to remember the symbol that the door person drew on the back of their hand.