BEFORE DEI HIRING…
AFTER…
and…
Huh. Well, I guess dining out habits in the U.S. have been evolving since the pandemic, as today’s news stories astutely observe…
Hooters, famous (or infamous) for a crude play on words and its mandatory attire for waitresses, is preparing for a potential bankruptcy filing as it works with creditors on a plan to restructure its operations, according to Bloomberg News.
What a surprise.
I feel no compunction in say this because I went to a Hooters once when Grace and I were desperately hungry and on the road. She was horrified and I spent the entire visit feeling sorry for the employees and hating the men there for ogling the women and making stupid comments. I left a huge tip, and announced that the Marshall family would boycott the place henceforth, barely getting the words out before Grace started her rant in the car.
As a sexual harassment trainer, I regarded the restaurant a hostile work environment by definition, except that some attractively-endowed women were so desperate that they consented to being demeaned. The chain is one notch above a strip club, and those awful places depress me too. (My law school room mate was a devotee.)
When I heard that Hooters (note that there is no apostrophe) had decided to be more, ah, inclusive in its hiring practices, I concluded that the owners were morons and that doom was around the corner. Its only excuse for existence was that men would go there to stare at attractive boobs stuffed into uncomfortably tight t-shirts while the pigs ate their Chili’s/Friday’s level food. Taking children there, in my view, was justification for a visit from child services.
But when there is one and only one justification, if you can call it that, for your business model’s existence and you reject it, your incompetence and stupidity has reached cosmic levels. The Hooters nonsense is a sequel to the demise of another company that embarrassed me, Victoria’s Secret. Remember when, after the Great Stupid spread its dark wings over the Earth, the company announced that it was replacing its established image of sexy models wearing lingerie and accoutrements designed to make men go wild in the boudoir, and would now be seeking an audience of woke women, #MeToo warriors, lesbians and the transgendered? Good times, good times… “When the world was changing, we were too slow to respond,” said Martin Waters, the new chief executive of the brand. “We needed to stop being about what men want and to be about what women want.” So—I still have trouble believing that this wasn’t a hoax—he hired Megan Rapinoe, the obnoxiously severe pink-haired soccer star and lesbian activist plus other feminists who had no possible connection to what the company had been selling, like Eileen Gu, a 17-year-old Chinese American freestyle skier, biracial and plus-size model Paloma Elsesser,and Priyanka Chopra Jonas, an Indian actor and tech investor. I wrote [Item#3],
“Good plan!” More than $5 billion in annual sales, and 32,000 jobs in a global retail network that includes roughly 1,400 stores are expected to withstand a company that tosses away its identity and announces that it is now the exact opposite of what made it successful, and that instead of appealing to male and female sexual fantasies, it will now seek to please feminist activists.
The world hasn’t changed as much as the CEO thinks it has. Rapinoe, the well-known sex symbol, is already shooting off her mouth, which is what she does, saying that the company has been“patriarchal, sexist, viewing not just what it meant to be sexy but what the clothes were trying to accomplish through a male lens and through what men desired. And it was very much marketed toward younger women,’ a message, she said, was “really harmful.” The soccer star added, “As a gay woman, I think a lot about what we think is sexy, and we are afforded the ability to do that, because I don’t have to wear the traditional sexy thing to be sexy and I don’t think the traditional thing is sexy when it comes to my partner or people I’ve dated. I think functionality is probably the sexiest thing we could possibly achieve in life. Sometimes just cool is sexy, too.”
Right….
Of course the new “woke” Victoria’s Secret flopped. We also saw the completely predictable demise of “woke” beauty pageants (also demeaning) and Bud Light, but Hooters and Victoria’s Secret will always be the symbols of “Get woke, go broke” for me.
I just wish the company was going bankrupt because American males had evolved beyond treating woman as walking, talking sets of tits.
mmm
Ethics Alarms 
I just wish the company was going bankrupt because American males had evolved beyond treating woman as walking, talking sets of tits.
Seeing the headline this morning that Hooters was declaring bankruptcy, I thought the above was the case. Silly me.
And I certainly had no idea Hooters girls looked as they evidently do now. Yikes. Couldn’t they have let the less standard issue (more standard issue?) workers be fully clothed? The places must be empty.
To be absolutely fair, I can’t confirm that any of those shots come directly from Hooters. The last one clearly was assembled for effect, which effect, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter: the point is that if your business model and marketing strategy is explicitly about having sexy waitresses with comely breasts, it is suicidal to start hiring not-so-comely women with average breasts, because that’s part of what your customers are paying for. For Hooters substitute Playboy Clubs.
That second photos is clearly not a photo of real Hooters staff. The first dead give away is some of the shirts have city names on them and the second is that other shirts have been intentionally shortened to reveal bare belly. Compare the shirts yourself. Those shirts don’t conform to ANY photos I’ve ever seen of Hooters girls. That must have been some kind of joke or contest.
Although I don’t agree with Hooters business model I’ve heard from reliable sources that they do have dress code standards and bare bellies will get you fired.
Side Note: I’ve only been in one Hooters in my life and that was on a trade show business trip. We were walking home from a great steak dinner restaurant in South Side Flats area of Pittsburg. The Hooters was along a major road on our walk back to our hotel across the Monongahela River and down by Point State Park. It had gotten to be well after dark and that area of town after dark wasn’t one of the safest places to be walking around (kinda like downtown Atlanta at night back in those days, limos, pimps and hookers everywhere harassing people) so we walked into the Hooters and called a cab. The Hooters had bars on the windows. I remember the staff being very understanding and professional. They gave us a tall table to hangout and wait for our cab (which took a really long time in that neighborhood), we had a glass of beer while we waited, and the greeting staff at the front door let us know when our cab arrived.
P.S. I completely agree with you that companies with business models like Hooters and Victoria’s Secret that chose to shift to the “woke” nonsense was going to be a failure for them.
Even if it was assembled for effect, it is my understanding that there is a segment of the population that prefers this exact look. In certain neighborhoods this might be a big draw.
Don’t get me started on the kind of wait staff that would be a big draw in “certain neighborhoods”….
“As a sexual harassment trainer, I regarded the restaurant a hostile work environment by definition, except that some attractively-endowed women were so desperate that they consented to being demeaned. The chain is one notch above a strip club, and those awful places depress me too. (My law school room mate was a devotee.)”
I’ve been to Hooters twice in my lifetime. The first time was curiosity and the second was it was the only choice. The food is the equivalent of every other chain that focuses on sports watching food. I am an observer more than a participant in social gatherings so I tend to watch interactions among people to better understand human dynamics. Jack’s post takes us down one path but I would like to explore an alternate way of looking at this.
I often wonder who is being exploited in these situations. How do we know that these attractively -endowed women were not using their attributes to exploit men who they would otherwise not give the time of day, let alone a second look for large tips. Why do we not lament the fact that there is a market among males who need to find some attractive female who will pay the slightest bit of attention to them? Are men supposed to be so stoic that they are barred from visual stimulation and conversation because a third party deems it to be demeaning to the women.
And now, what of the economic opportunities that are being lost to the women who chose to be instrumental in making Hooters a success. Should required inclusivity or someone with a different set of subjective values be able to destroy any opportunity that is particularly suited for young women. This is one area where the concept of “my body my choice” is relevant. It is also relevant that a business should have the right to determine which employees will promote the enterprise best and thus improve profits. Many years ago right out of high school I was once told no for a labor job because I was too big. That was a job installing fiberglass insulation. That was the best no I ever got. The point is physical attributes do play a role in who is best for a given position – just ask the Red Sox.
We have to face the fact that some women choose to market their physical attributes in environments that pay handsomely. Are we still clinging to the belief that women have no agency in their own economic decisions that men must protect them from themselves. I don’t think so.
Given that applying to work at Hooters was consensual with the women knowing full well the attire I cannot see how this is any more sexual harassment than a theatrical production requiring women to be nude in certain scenes. Are such productions also hostile work environments?
Apparently, it must be a good business model because even those repulsed by it gave them a “large tip”.
Sorry, the lower comment was meant to be a direct reply to you.
Full disclosure, I have a religious bias against premarital sex and anything likely to lead to it, That being said, I intend to argue against the Hooter’s business model from a secular perspective.
I think that IS lamentable. Paying someone attractive to be nice to you, whether it be a Hooters waitress, a geisha, or a full-on hooker shouldn’t be necessary for any decent man who has something to offer besides money.
For the record, I don’t want to ban Hooters, but I don’t think it’s a healthy place to patronize or work at. Society works best when adults engage in faithful, monogamous, heterosexual relationships. Using sex as a commodity reduces it to a drug, rather than an expression of intimacy between husband and wife, and raising the next generation. Also, if your only value to society is your body, then even if your physique isn’t ruined by an accident or disease, you can’t resist the march of time. And outside of pro athletics and acting, most people would rather not sell their bodies if they can avoid it. I read in a book by a human rights activist (can’t remember the name), that their organization once supported legalizing prostitution, in the belief that it would better protect sex workers. They changed their stance after they observed that even in places where prostitution was legal, the industry still had the same abuses. It is very hard to not get treated like an object when your only role is providing pleasure.
I’d like for our host to weigh in on that one.
Irreverence; thy name is The Babylon Bee:
Hooters Bankruptcy Deals Heavy Blow To Nation’s Creepy, Middle-Aged Weirdos
Hooters Bankruptcy Deals Heavy Blow To Nation’s Creepy, Middle-Aged Weirdos
PWS
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2025-03-27/hooters-founders-make-a-pg-13-pitch-video
because…
“More mammaries, more families”