Happy Mother’s Day, Mom! Let’s Go to Hooters!

“Happy Mother’s Day, Mom! Let’s go to Hooters!”

At least that’s what Hooters hope’s you’ll be saying to your mom tomorrow. No joke. Hooters is offering a Mother’s Day special. Every mom who brings a child to Hooters tomorrow and orders at drink will get a free entrée, up to a ten dollar value.

When I first read the article in USA Today that announced this Hooters Mother’s Day promotion, I wondered if USA Today had been hacked by someone with a creative and comedic mind. But, after checking the Hooters website, I became convinced the USA Today was telling the truth.

Before I share a few excerpts from the article, I should mention, just in case you’re in the 1% of people unfamiliar with the Hooters brand, that it’s a restaurant known mainly its shapely female waitresses wearing tight t-shirts and tiny nylon shorts. I have not had the privilege of eating at Hooters (fancy that), but I have walked through the franchise that spills out in the San Antonio Riverwalk. Suffice it to say that I would not bring my wife or mother here for any occasion, even if our entire dinner was free. Call me uptight and old fashioned. Call me a feminist. Call me whatever, but don’t invite me and the significant women in my life to Hooters.

Okay, back to the article. Here are a few choice excerpts:

The chain famous for its waitresses in sexy uniforms has long struggled to attract female customers — particularly mothers.

[Huh. I wonder why that could be?]

Hooters’ marketing chief says the chain just wants women to see the that Hooters is not the big, bad wolf of dining. “It’s not as diabolical as you think,” says Dave Henninger, chief marketing officer. “We know you don’t think of Hooters as a typical place to take Mom, but we want to make it more appealing for Mom to come in.” Hooters’ five new entree salads, all priced under $10, are one attempt by the chain to appeal more to women, he says.

[Don’t you just love it? “We know you don’t think of Hooters as a typical place to take Mom.”]

But some skeptics think that Hooters has a long way to go before it has any genuine appeal to women. “For a woman to walk into a place called Hooters,” says Robert Thompson, professor of pop culture at Syracuse University, “that new Cobb salad had better be awfully good.”

[Indeed.]

Once again, truth is stranger than fiction!

I’m tempted to get up on my soapbox and rail against this sort of thing, but sometimes the critique is so obvious it can’t be enhanced with words.