The great minds over at Hooters, the "breastaurant" chain (an actual term used to describe restaurants that employ scantily clad women as waitresses) whose name is derived from a Steve Martin comedy skit, have a problem: how to get women into their man caves while still keeping their man caves hot messes filled with short-short and tight-shirt-wearing waitresses.
Sounds like a C-cup challenge for new Hooters CEO Terry Marks. According to Bloomberg, "[Marks] found women also were steering clear because the menu was stale, the restaurants were dated, and the food was overpriced. Marks wants to remove the Hooters stigma, so men aren't embarrassed to put the chain on an expense account and women aren't as quick to veto a meal there."
What to do? Marks has some ideas, but will any of them work?
Bloomberg reports that in an effort to still keep Hooters "sexy" while trying to attract more female customers, the chain has:
- Switched to fresh instead of frozen wings and hamburger patties.
- Doubled its salads to six.
- Included fries with the burgers and blue cheese with the wings after previously having customers pay for them separately.
And in the future, Hooters will:
- Feature a series of new television ads that "feature devil owl and angel owl finger puppets giving advice to guys."
- Renovate 70 percent of its stores to include street-level patios, contemporary decor, and larger windows.
- Move the bars to the middle of the restaurants and circle them with seating for "late-night socializing."
- Add new cocktails and more wines with some locations staying open until 2 a.m.
Hm, those ideas sound more customer-specific than female-specific, but then, really, barring changing the name -- 'cause c'mon, who even says that any more? -- does any of this really make sense? After all, Hooters (which might as well just call itself "Boobies") has built its almost 30-year history on a bad joke, scantily clad servers, and a dude-centric customer base that now frequents 430 locations.
Not surprisingly, Bloomberg goes on to say the one thing Hooters won't be changing is the skimpiness of the uniform worn by its waitresses.
