I was in a wedding party and felt bummed I had to skip out on the bachelor party, because we had a big deadline that very weekend. I mentioned to a supervisor that I was thinking of just flying out for a day and catching a redeye back, but decided not to.
This reminded me of a non-work antimustachian story, I don't want to make a new thread. Apologies for hijacking with this story.
I did exactly what you described - declined a bachelor party (mainly to avoid spending the money), and regretted it. My wife pointed out I was being too frugal since I had much more money than every person going to it (probably combined), and I have the self-control to not gamble. So I missed the first night of the bachelor party, but got a cheap flight to Las Vegas the next morning. Got their location by pretending I was sending a bottle of alcohol to them and showed up as a surprise. Fun experience, and got to stay in a free spare bed because one guy was there on points.
What did I come into after night one? A total financial trainwreck, and no gambling had occurred! To try to save money, they avoided the top-rated strip clubs that charge a cover, opting for one that had no cover and offered a free limo to pick you up, plus lap dances were advertised for $20 instead of $30. If you're going to a strip club no matter what, this seems like a decent cost-saving plan on paper.
Well on the ride, the driver convinces them "IT'S VEGAS BABY," and sells them on bottle service. A bottle costs about what all of them would have combined to in covers at the big time strip clubs. (Good sales pitch, even if the math didn't hold up.) They order two bottles of booze, somewhere around $500-$750 per bottle, before even walking in.
What do they walk into? A ghost town. They're the only customers, and there are 20+ strippers ready and waiting to pounce on the first people that walk in. One enterprising woman homes in on the guy she can tell is the mark, Bill. The two of them disappear for awhile. At the big clubs, the customer-to-worker ratio would be flipped, and they could have blended into a crowd, possibly even having to bribe someone to get a stripper to come over to them. Now they have multiple women all over each of them, one by one talking each guy into buying the bachelor a lap dance as soon as the last one ended, and each guy is essentially bullied into lap dances of their own, or else risk spending the entire night saying "No thank you" on repeat and being met with disdain.
Half an hour into being there, Bill returns. He's standing in front of the ATM with his stripper waiting patiently, intently watching as he inserts not one, not two, but THREE credit cards for cash advances. What happened? Exactly what Chris Rock told you doesn't happen. She didn't ask, just went for it all and he didn't decline, and it cost him maxing out 3 cards. And he didn't even seem very happy about the experience.
Two overpriced bottles of booze, at least 25 lap dances, and one ruined credit score later, they get their wits about them that they're being hosed and leave after only about 90 minutes, but it's cost them a small fortune. One of the boys put one of the bottles on his debit card and immediately gets a call from his wife across the country - he's just spent their rent money and he spends the rest of the weekend muttering, "I am so f---ed." So by the time I show up, no one wants to spend a dime and our time is spent drinking for free in the hotel room, and wandering the strip, watching other people gamble, at best. The final night is spent at a bar that served tap water so we could sit and watch football for free. My biggest expense was just buying my friends drinks because I felt so guilty I had spent almost nothing, even though I could afford it best out of all of them. They're great guys and they really tried in advance to slow the bleed, but Vegas won.
I ran into Bill a year later. He told me he was happy that he was almost done paying off the credit cards from the party. We also speculated it probably cost him more in doctors visits when we got home, but the man had suffered enough so we didn't harass him for details on that.
So if you HAVE to go to Vegas for a bachelor party and do it all - show up a day late, don't gamble (duh), and sell your friends that the pricier strip clubs will actually save them money. Let Bill's sacrifice at least be someone else's gain.