The End of Hooters

For decades, you couldn’t drive down a highway in America without seeing her: a tan, blond woman, scantily clad in orange and white, laid across a billboard, her legs as long as the semitrucks zooming past her. Keep Your Eyes on the Road, it might say. Or Come See Me at Hooters.

When I was 12, in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, I went to Hooters for the first time. It was 2010 and the chain was only a few years away from its peak, when it would have more than 430 locations around the world. It was the kind of place my mom refused to enter, but my friends’ parents didn’t seem to feel the same compunction. When the waitress came to take our order, I remember being surprised that my friend’s dad knew her name. I stared down at my kids’ menu, feeling keenly that I should avoid eye contact with both the woman and the owl on her shirt.

It was obvious to me, even as a kid, that this restaurant wasn’t made for me. It was there to serve the appetites of America’s men. And now its day may be ending. Hooters of America is about $300 million in debt, and this winter began preparing for a possible bankruptcy filing. In 2024, it closed about 40 locations in the United States.

Hooters isn’t the only chain in trouble. The full-service casual chain restaurant as a category—what Sam Oches, the editor of Nation’s Restaurant News, calls the “generic American bar and grill”—is struggling. Last year, Red Lobster and TGI Friday’s filed for bankruptcy. These restaurants lost customers during the coronavirus pandemic and have struggled to attract young diners, Oches told me, who are “more adventurous” and want “an exciting experience so they can post it to their social accounts.” These chains could possibly restructure and turn their business around. But it’s not likely, experts in the restaurant industry I spoke with predicted. Especially not for Hooters.

Hooters was founded in 1983 by six Florida men with no restaurant experience who wanted to “open a place they couldn’t get kicked out of.” They were all in their 30s, except for the oldest, whom they lovingly referred to as Uncle Billy. The business was a joke—the friends expected it to fail, and incorporated the company on April Fools’ Day. Instead, the sexually explicit restaurant, with its Hooters Girls and boob-forward logo, became a hit.

[Derek Thompson: America’s loneliness epidemic comes for the restaurant]

For a long time, the “titillating naughtiness of Hooters” was a draw, Sarah Pedersen, an expert in women in the media at Robert Gordon University, in Scotland, told me. But lately, the brand has gotten dated. The menu is tired; people can get chicken wings anywhere. What made Hooters special was the Hooters Girl, and the Hooters Girl seems to be going out of style. “This idea of sort of smacking the ass of the woman wearing the tight shorts,” as Pederson put it, isn’t attractive to younger people who have grown up with the explicit sexuality of porn and OnlyFans and learned to be “very careful about consent.”

And yet even while Hooters falters, another chain of “breastaurants” is booming. Twin Peaks, which was founded in Texas in 2005, also uses sex to sell bar food: Draft beer comes in Dirty Blonde, Knotty Brunette, and Drop Dead Redhead. Uniforms at Twin Peaks are even skimpier than the ones at Hooters—on holidays and specific weekdays, waitresses wear only lingerie. And the company plans to open at least 10 new locations this year.

Which makes you wonder: Is Hooters too naughty, or not naughty enough?

From the start, Hooters faced blowback—and lawsuits. In 1997, a group of men sued Hooters for hiring only female servers. The restaurant responded that being a woman was a bona fide occupational qualification and that employing an all-female waitstaff was a business necessity. They said that Hooters waitresses were not just waitresses but also entertainers. The company eventually paid a settlement and agreed to hire more men as bartenders and hosts—just not as servers. (As some Hooters websites put it: “We’re looking for a few good men and a lot of great women.”)

On other occasions, Hooters restaurants have been sued for sexual harassment (in one case, a jury ordered a Hooters in Kentucky to pay a server $275,000 in damages after she accused her managers of harassing her; the company said the evidence didn’t support the verdict). Hooters restaurants have been sued for weight discrimination (two servers sued a Michigan location for firing them because they were not slim enough; the company objected that its waitresses are entertainers whose looks are a business concern, and the case was settled through arbitration). And some have been sued for racial discrimination (just last year Hooters settled a suit brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging that, after a North Carolina restaurant laid off 43 employees early in the pandemic, it hired back only the white and lighter-skinned women; the company argued that “skin tone is subjective” but agreed to change some of its policies).

Lawsuits may have been factored into Hooters’ business model, but the company has had a harder time responding to broader shifts in society, such as the decreasing tolerance for boorish and predatory male behavior. In 2017, the year the #MeToo movement first went viral, Hooters opened an offshoot called Hoots Wings, which hired both male and female waiters wearing more traditional uniforms. It was an attempt to rebrand as family friendly, and to draw in more female customers. But it was seen as a failure. Only a handful of Hoots Wings opened, and most have now closed.

In 2021, Hooters tried to introduce a new uniform bottom that looked far more like underwear than shorts. Hooters Girls took to TikTok to complain about the change. “Love my job but dont love wearing undies to work,” read the caption on one employee’s viral video. Leadership quickly reversed the policy, leaving it up to the waitresses to decide which bottoms they would wear.

Hooters seemed to be flip-flopping between, on the one hand, striving for political correctness and wooing female diners and, on the other, trying to keep up with the sexual desires of its male customers. But restaurants are never successful when they try “to be something that they’re not,” Jonathan Maze, the editor in chief of Restaurant Business, told me. “Hooters is Hooters,” he said. “You really think that women en masse are going to go to Hooters? The logo is an owl deliberately designed to look like two breasts. There is zero way that women are going to actively go into the restaurant.”

[Leah Sottile: ‘Just because I work here doesn’t mean I don’t respect myself’]

Oches agreed. “People know Hooters for one thing,” he said: the skimpy outfits. Say the chain dressed all its waiters in khakis and white-collared shirts tomorrow. People aren’t going to go around saying, “‘Hooters? Oh no, they don’t do that anymore,’” Oches said. “It’s always going to be a part of them.” Hooters’ sexual image is literally in its name, which was inspired by a Steve Martin monologue on Saturday Night Live. (“I believe it’s derogatory to refer to a woman’s breasts as boobs, jugs, Winnebagos, or golden bozos, and that you should only refer to them as hooters.”)

The way forward, Oches argued, is to “lean into” your identity and “own it.”

Maybe that will be easier for Hooters to do under the Trump administration. Benjamin Sachs, a labor-law professor at Harvard, predicted that a more conservative Equal Employment Opportunity Commission might mean laxer rules for businesses. “I think we’ll see less rigorous enforcement of the discrimination laws,” he told me, an outcome that he said would be “unfortunate.” If Donald Trump saves the “breastaurant” industry, it would be one of the less shocking developments of his second term.

Downsizing could be another way for Hooters to get back to its target audience, geographically speaking. If you look at a map of Twin Peaks restaurants, you’ll notice that there are none in the Northeast and very few in blue states elsewhere in the country. Twin Peaks may have a smaller national presence than Hooters, but it’s going public, not bankrupt. If you don’t “sell well in a particular market, then you shouldn’t be there,” Dennis Gemberling, the president of the hospitality consulting firm Perry Group International, told me. The nation is already divided into red and blue Americas; maybe red America remains Hooters America, and breastaurants still have a future there.

Regardless of the reasons behind the company’s decline, the impending bankruptcy threatens to put Hooters’ staff—70 percent of which is female—out of work. The company employs more than 18,000 Hooters Girls around the globe. What will these people do next?

Stripping is one possible answer, though many understandably bristle at the comparison. “What’s the difference between a Hooters waitress and a stripper?” Mike Dickinson, the manager of the Admiral Theatre strip club, in Chicago, asked me. His answer: “About six weeks.”

His club is offering a special sign-on bonus of $10,000 for former Hooters Girls. The press release invited “Hooters bartenders and waitresses facing possible unemployment due to Hooters’ impending bankruptcy” to “immediately audition as professional nude entertainers to put their assets to use in more profitable work.” Dickinson told me that nine Hooters Girls have signed on since the announcement, and many more have reached out to audition.

Ashley Williams is one of the women who’s taken the Admiral Theatre up on the offer. She’d noticed on Instagram that a woman she’d worked with at a Hooters in the Chicago suburbs had a new BMW and “a lot of cash.” She reached out and learned that the woman was stripping at the Admiral, and soon followed. “At Hooters, we were lucky to make $150 in tips,” she told me. On an average night at the Admiral, she now makes $2,500.

Williams’s former Hooters is still open, but she thinks the brand is doomed: It’s “just too tame for today’s customers.”

[Sophie Gilbert: The movement of #MeToo]

For a long time, Hooters knew how to sell just enough sex to be palatable to people like my Southern Baptist neighbors. There weren’t any strip clubs in my town. There was just Hooters, and men could always say they only went there for the wings.

One of my high-school classmates, Halle Grogan, started as a hostess at the Hooters in Murfreesboro when she was 17. The day she turned 18 and could start serving liquor, she became a Hooters Girl. “I wore my birthday sash” that day, she told me, and “made the most money I’ve ever made in my life on a night serving.”

She had good managers and bad ones; good customers and bad ones. “A lot of them weren’t creepy,” she said about the men she served. Then she added: “Half of them were.” Regulars tended to come on weekday afternoons “between, like, noon and four, at that slow time” when they could “sit and have their time with” their favorite Hooters Girl. Many of the men were veterans who she thought had PTSD, she said. She felt sorry for them, and saw Hooters as “a hub for lonely, single men.” Her colleagues called one man the “Pantyhose Guy” because he would pay $50 for the pantyhose the Hooters Girls wore to make their legs look tan.

“I was a baby,” Grogan told me. “I’d grown up in a very Christian household.” She had barely “even touched alcohol in my life. I didn’t even know what drunk men were like. I was thrown into a shark tank.”

One night, she was cleaning out the bathroom before the restaurant closed. Men were lined up outside waiting for her to finish. “I was in the back stall changing the trash. I never heard him come in. I never heard him. I turned around, and he’s standing there staring at me.” A middle-aged man who was a regular at the restaurant had entered the restroom and shut the door behind him. She said he had pulled his pants down and told her to “suck my dick.”

If that had happened to her now that she’s a 26-year-old woman, she said, “I would have knocked him out with my fist. At that time, all I knew what to do was run. So I shoved him to the side” and ran out the door. Immediately, she told her manager that the man had exposed himself to her, expecting him to be promptly kicked out. But she said that’s not what happened. The manager “goes, ‘We can’t. He’s a regular, and he gives us a lot of money.’” Grogan recalls her manager saying: “You signed up for this position. Look at what you’re wearing.” (Hooters did not reply to a request for comment.)

Grogan described it as “probably the most mortifying thing that ever happened to me as a teenager.” She walked out and quit that week.

That Hooters is still open, but maybe not for long. Even in Murfreesboro, customers seem to have gotten uncomfortable dining at the crossroads of erotic and family friendly—at a place that offers its customers high chairs, kids’ menus, and waitresses dressed in uniforms just large enough to head off harassment charges. On many nights, the parking lot is almost empty.