Alex Wise at Loveawake blog lists 29 reasons nightclubs suck. 

The whole thing is worth a read, but essentially boils down to:

• Capricious waitstaff
• Over-entitled women
• Guys posturing and blowing large amounts of money for no return
• A superficial, unenjoyable environment

I really don’t enjoy nightclubs, am usually bored to death inside, and generally avoid them unless it’s, say, a friend’s birthday or some special event that justifies my presence. (One time I escorted some exchange students I had met that night to a high-end club, and wrote off the cover and coat fee as random fun and introducing visitors to my country.)

Young people in cities feel some kind of collective pressure to hit the nightclub scene as a behavioral marker that they are making an effort to be social, and in particular I find women view “going out” clubbing as a sort of essential lifestyle element to their ouevre – as if to say “see? I’m out in the world trying to meet guys, it’s not my fault I’m single, I’m not a crazy cat lady shut-in!” I frequently overhear women complain they have trouble meeting men, to responses of “OH well you should COME OUT with us this weekend!” so that they can go participate in the hookup culture they say they hate. As for the guys, Dane Cook said it – they go where the girls are.

Clubs are standard game training grounds because although they are difficult to hack it in, there’s constant turnover of prospects and it’s basically low risk: normally the worst that can happen is a drunk chick yells at you (or in Roosh’s case in Baltimore, slugs you once in a lifetime of game). I never went the club-game route to polish my skills, the environment was a total mismatch to my personality and I had little interest in Mystery’s style of befriending groups of clubgoers in batches.

The only kind of club game that produces any results for me is akin to an out-of-body experience – I abandon all expectations of anything happening at all (including having conversations with the guys I arrived with) and adopt a completely detached demeanor, entirely devoid of even the slightest shade of supplication or trying to impress anybody. On occasion this merits me a conversation with an equally-bored and out of place female who is ripe to be isolated outside the establishment. Usually, though, it just gets me a $20 tab for cover and a Manhattan they made wrong – who the F puts an orange in a Manhattan? – and an early exit to preserve my sanity. A late-night blog perusal never felt so good.