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VIDEOWorst Work Uniforms: Hooters
By
Scott Reeves Jan 27, 2010 12:20 pm
"Tacky" hardly covers the barely-there outfit.
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Every red-blooded male, especially fans of Jersey Shore, knows that Hooters girls are about as socially acceptable as the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, the swimsuit models in Sports Illustrated (TWX), or the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall in New York.
Hooters pitches itself as a beach-themed bar-and-grill for sports fans, but the truth can now be told: The main attraction is the servers in bright orange shorts and white shirts, not the flat panel TV screens showing the Pluto State vs. University of the Equator game.
The privately held company operates and franchises about 450 Hooters of America restaurants in 45 states and 25 foreign countries. It’s a highly competitive sector. Amazingly, Brinker International (EAT), Buffalo Wild Wings (BWLD), and Carlson Restaurants Worldwide compete with Hooters on food and value -- not the skimpy outfits.
So, what’s the gripe? The usual suspects say the waitresses’ uniform is a sexist atrocity -- or worse. We say it's just plain unattractive, regardless of your political position.
What’s clear is that tight shirts and dangerously short shorts underscore a basic point: Those who serve the food at Hooters are female. That’s a good thing, especially for perpetual adolescents, because the food is generally gloppy, tasteless, and high in fat. A little aerobic exercise sparked by the waitresses’ silly outfits may offset the deleterious effect of all that gunk and remind the semi-conscious, especially those approaching geezerhood, that they’re still alive.
But if massive doses of the food at Hooters don’t kill you, the sanctimony from academics will. The restaurant chain has attracted attention from the academic world ever since it opened its first outlet in 1983.
An example: In “Hooting: Public and Popular Discourse about Sex Discrimination” published in 1998 by the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, professor Kenneth Schneyer argues that "Hooters’s supporters use their rhetoric to proffer the view that the intellectual and political elites are at war with 'common sense' and the ordinary American." But the debate is complex, Schneyer notes, and such rhetoric isn’t helpful in resolving the weighty issue of the propriety of sexual entertainment in a society that condemns sex discrimination.
Well, golly! This just in: Women are smart and can make their own choices without bowing to the “cognitive elite.”
Would howling academics say women are henceforth forever forbidden to ogle Olympic swimmers or any man without a beer gut in the name of political correctness? Or that a woman working her way through school should be denied the opportunity to make good money in a part-time job that won’t interfere with her studies?
Hooters generates more than enough hyperventilating to go around. In 1991, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission launched an investigation into alleged discrimination at Hooters because the company refused to hire male waiters. In an 80-page finding released in 1994, the EEOC concluded that “no physical trait unique to women is required to serve food and drink to customers in a restaurant.”
That’s your tax dollars at work. As long as we’re at it, why not require Radio City Music Hall to hire men with hairy, stumpy legs to dance with the Rockettes?Luckily, there are plenty of entrepreneurs at the courthouse. A man in Texas recently settled a class action lawsuit against Hooters for refusing to hire men to serve food. Terms weren’t disclosed.
The flip side: Women have sued Hooters for alleged sex discrimination because the company tends to hire shapely, ahem, pneumatic women. This raises a basic question: Can a company set standards for its employees and hire only those who meet its marketing image, no matter how juvenile or offensive to some?
Maybe. A company can require employees who deal with the public to meet clearly stated grooming standards. The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a requirement that female bartenders at a casino wear makeup and “teased, curled or styled” hair, prompting mucho gnashing of teeth in academia.
Issues of sexism aside, you have to wonder whether there's any way to hold the restaurant accountable for its lack of good taste. Note to Hooters management: Your waitresses would be saucier if they wore long white dresses, black lace chokers, horn-rimmed glasses, and carried the collected poems of John Keats because wit, not gym clothes, are enticing.
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