Hooters waitresses on mens' shoulders, with a tweet about Hooters offering therapy.

hooters/Facebook ericadamhovis/Twitter beehivesy/Twitter Remix by Samantha Grasso

Man’s solution to save breastaurants from killer millennials: Hooters, but make it therapy

TBH, tricking Hooters patrons into going to therapy isn't that bad of an idea.

Photo of Samantha Grasso 

Samantha Grasso

IRL

Posted on Aug 21, 2018   Updated on May 21, 2021, 8:16 am CDT

The American institution of breastaurants are under attack—by murderous millennials, of course—and it’s a sign that we’re going to have to reinvent the wheel altogether.

So, should we go ahead and do away with sub-par sports bars where women’s bodies are the main attraction? Absolutely not. We just gotta keep the Hooters brand, but make it body positive, and maybe like an adult arcade, and also include therapy. Lots and lots of cheap professional therapy.

At least, that’s what Hooters should look like in 2018, according to Twitter user Eric Adam Hovis, who has high dreams and even higher expectations.

On Sunday, Twitter mourned (and celebrated) the announced decline of the Hooters dynasty. According to Business Insider, Hooters is being “forced” to close locations and change strategy, possibly because millennials are no longer bonkers for boobs per Pornhub’s findings.

Many weren’t too surprised that a restaurant with bad food that relies on the objectification of women wasn’t doing well.

Hovis, too, understood why Hooters was now out of touch with his peers. He himself isn’t a big fan of “the Barbie look” involving big boobs, bleach blonde hair, and deep tans, and isn’t into the “superficial novelty” of getting dinner at a place where he could stare at a woman’s breasts. But he did have a few ideas as to how Hooters could appeal to millennial customers such as himself.

No, Hooters hasn’t reached the end of its breastaurant run—it just needed an expansion. For him to be excited about the chain again, Hooters would need to make its staff more inclusive with diverse bodies (lol). And the restaurant wouldn’t need to advertise its staff to bring in clientele. Instead, patrons would be there to talk to the staff. Debate nights, game rooms, a “geisha place” (whatever that might mean), and a “specialized setup for the guys who just want to therapeutically vent their woes to women.”

“…For me as a millennial to be excited about Hooters it would need to be a fundamentally different experience that, instead of relying on a superficial novelty, instead cultivates meaningful human interactions in a world increasingly isolated by convenience and technology,” Hovis wrote. Very far from any Hooters restaurant I’ve driven by, indeed.

Yes, Hovis proposed that Hooters become a Lincoln-Douglas-style Dave & Busters slash therapists office. Where staff would get paid at least the minimum wage, and more depending on their professional experience, but patrons would still be paying for cheap.

Scheming the kind of men who like breastaurants into going to therapy via chicken wings doesn’t sound like too bad of a plan, but the internet certainly didn’t hear it that way. Hovis might have intended for his “Hooters but for therapy” pitch to reflect upon what millennials want versus what corporations are giving them, but his tweets certainly came off otherwise, implying that it’s a waitresses’ role to engage in debates with patrons while also listening to their own personal traumas, for minimum wage.

“This is possibly the most incel sounding thing I’ve read ever… You know if this isn’t parody I think what [you’re] really searching for is friends,” one person countered Hovis.

“This is one [of] the cringiest, most embarrassing things I’ve ever read,” another tweeted. “What you are looking for is a therapist. A therapist and friends and also a date somehow.”

https://twitter.com/Nassergamez/status/1031539745028022272

One woman simply asked, “Are men OK?”

https://twitter.com/beehivesy/status/1031378830265528320

https://twitter.com/fatnudes/status/1031414651039481856

In the day after Hovis’ very unfortunate Twitter roast, he bounced back to clarify that doesn’t think restaurant staff should be involuntary therapists, that everyone should receive a living wage, and that if the body objectification model is absolutely necessary (note: it’s not), Hooters should have “body-positive” hiring practices. His mistake, he tweeted, was having poorly written his Hooters retort.

So, Hovis did his Hooters haters one further and wrote a post explaining these ideas in more depth, writing that he thinks we should hire real therapists for that whole in-house therapy idea, and he looked up the term geisha, and they’re not the same as prostitutes, so it’s OK to talk about them in the context of hospitality and entertainment.

“Rather than the simpler question of ‘What kind of restaurant should Hooters be?’ I’m addressing the question of ‘What kind of business would be worth my time and money?'” Hovis wrote.

So, perhaps, this is again another example of a miscommunication via Twitter gone wrong (or, right)? Regardless, if turning Hooters into an adult Chuck E. Cheese’s with mental health care professionals on site is the only way to save the company, we might as well quit the breastaurant industry while we’re ahead.

Hovis did not return the Daily Dot’s request for comment.

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*First Published: Aug 21, 2018, 2:47 pm CDT

Samantha Grasso

Samantha Grasso is a former IRL staff writer for the Daily Dot with a reporting emphasis on immigration. Her work has appeared on AJ+, Vox, Splinter, Los Angeles Magazine, and Austin Monthly.

Samantha Grasso