Episode 62 – Can Hooters really become a Family Friendly Brand?

The chicken wings aren’t even that good…

Hooters, we all know of it, and maybe you love it, but do they have what it takes to change their brand?

This month, I am plugging the St. Louis Area Foodbank. To get more information, or to find out how to donate your time/money/food, visit their website: https://stlfoodbank.org/

SOURCES: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T-oaJYtfCr2lBFitwSl3TqEbzEOSX9Ro1uX7YFqLukA/edit?usp=sharing

The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.

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TRANSCRIPT:

EPISODE 62: CAN HOOTERS REALLY BECOME A FAMILY FRIENDLY BRAND?

I have eaten at Hooters precisely once in my life – if you’re watching the video version, ignore my fake background here, I’m not really in Hooters as I record this – and as it happens, it was very reminiscent of the episode of The Office where Michael Scott decides to take Jim Halpert to Hooters for lunch.

This was back during a time when I was single before I met my wife, and a single friend of mine decided we should go to Hooters for lunch because he wanted to flirt with the lunch servers. Hooters, as you may know, is famous for being a casual dining spot with a beach theme and female servers who wear low-cut white shirts with owls on them and orange short-shorts, though they’re often wearing hose underneath those shorts and showing off a lot less skin than it may appear.

Anyhow, my friend decided to start flirting with the server and she was completely not into it at all. I don’t know if she was having a bad day already or she wasn’t receptive to his attention, but either way, she was very clearly going through the motions with us and was not interested in hearing any mildly suggestive jokes or playing along in any way. I was growing more and more uncomfortable as we sat there because my friend was not picking up on the vibe while I wanted nothing more than to take my food to go and get out of there. I’ve never been back, and now that I’m married and also a long-time vegetarian, Hooters really doesn’t have a lot to offer me anyhow.

 That’s not to say I have anything against Hooters as a company; they’ve been in business as long as my company, RPG – we both started in 1983 – and they’re a very successful brand that certainly has an appeal to many people.

But when I read in the news recently that Hooters is not only coming out of bankruptcy but trying to reposition itself as a family-friendly restaurant, it made me think a little bit about how important it is to be willing to change when you’re in the restaurant business… and how skeptical I am that Hooters has the right ingredients to pull off a brand repositioning of that magnitude.

And hey – I’m rooting for them! They’re one of many brands in the casual dining scene fighting to stay alive, and today we’re going to talk about how Hooters, and other chains like it, have an opportunity to change themselves to stay relevant in 2026 and beyond.

I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.

So just this week, on January 26, Hooters and its new agency partner, The Door, appeared in an article on PR Week announcing that the company has been purchased by a group of franchisees and its original founders under a new entity called Original Hooters, and their goal is to bring Hooters back to its roots.

Some of this involves simplifying the menu, using better ingredients, having more community events, and streamlining things to keep prices down. A lot of this was communicated in a press release from November 5^th of last year. But the PR Week piece also contained details about something I’m sure everyone wants to know – how in the world is Hooters, which is known for servers in skimpy-looking outfits, going to pull off the family friendly idea?

Apparently, the plan is not to phase out the “World Famous Hooters Girls,” but to return to less revealing uniforms more typical of the 1980s, with jogging shorts and less prominent cleavage that fit their earlier slogan, “delightfully tacky, yet unrefined.”

I do think this is a good move – back in 2021, Hooters had a lot of negative press coverage and social media chatter for switching to a very revealing set of bikini-style shorts that barely covered its servers’ bottoms – but I do question if it really makes sense in 2026.

The 1980s was a weird time. People were tired of the very open sexuality of the late 60s and 70s and moving way from revealing clothing like halter tops and tank tops and more into fashions that had sharp lines and lots of fabric.

Hooters thrived in that 80s culture because it was positioned as a beach restaurant where people were a little more relaxed about fashion, and it benefitted from the transition of dining away from restaurants where you’d dress up to go out and eat to casual dining experiences like Applebee’s, TGI Friday’s or Chili’s where you could come as you are and not worry about being judged.

When we got a Hooters in the 1980s in St. Louis at Union Station, it was more of a novelty than anything else because it felt like a theme restaurant aimed at tourists visiting the mall there. Hooters expanded along with those other casual dining restaurants that offered bar food, alcohol and kitsch to open other locations around town, and as time went on, it became a pretty normal place for people to go for lunch or dinner.

When I talk about the rise of casual dining, there’s sort of a “you had to be there” element to this, because when I was a kid in the 1980s, it was pretty common for my parents to make me wear my nice Sunday clothes whenever we went out to an actual restaurant with service staff.

And this carried on into the 1990s. Just to put things in perspective, when I turned 16 in the mid-1990s, our local Red Lobster was still positioned as a fine-dining restaurant where you’d wear nice clothes. They built another location a mile away that was more of a beach-casual vibe, and by the time I was graduating high school, you didn’t need to dress up to go to Red Lobster anymore.

2026 is not a particularly good time to run a casual dining restaurant. TGI Friday’s is trying to make a comeback after filing for bankruptcy in 2024 and shrinking down to just 130 restaurants in the US, but it remains to be seen if they’ll be able to pull it off. Denny’s just closed 150 locations and went through a buyout led by one of its largest franchisees. On the Border Mexican Grill & Cantina filed for Chapter 11 in 2025 and has been closing stores, and Houlihan’s, which went into bankruptcy in 2019, has continued closing restaurants since the Landry’s company bailed them out, and they’re now down to 22 restaurants. Romano’s Macaroni Grill has gotten down to just 17 locations, which is about 10% of the number of locations they had a decade ago.

FAT Brands, which owns a lot of restaurant chains like Johnny Rockets, Yalla Mediterranean and Smokey Bones as well as the fast food chain Fazoli’s and buffets like Ponderosa Steakhouse and Bonanza Steakhouse, has been closing restaurants and is also bankrupt with very little capital left to pay its leases or creditors.

Oh, and FAT Brands also owns the subsidiary company that operates Twin Peaks, a Hooters knock-off with similarly skimpy outfits and suggestive phrasing alongside its smash burgers and smoked meats. That subsidiary is also bankrupt, and it remains to be seen what will happen with them, though they claim they’re going to keep their locations open for now.

The only casual dining chain that’s really thriving right now is Chili’s. Their playbook of reducing costs through streamlined menus, improving service and offering a high level of value relative to food quality seems to be the one to follow. Chili’s is seeing year over year growth and it’s actually super hard to just walk in and grab a table at many of their locations right now.

Now, hey, both Chili’s and Hooters have been featured on The Office as places Michael Scott likes to do business, but if you watch that show, you’ll also notice how differently they’re portrayed. Chili’s is a place where the serving staff sort of blend in to the background as they’re dropping off appetizers or drinks or baby back ribs. But Hooters is a place where the servers in their skimpy outfits are more or less the star. I know a lot of people go to Hooters for the chicken wings, but I also know that when I mentioned to my wife and kids that Hooters is trying to make a family-friendly comeback, even my middle schooler son raised a skeptical eyebrow and asked me if I understood that the name of the restaurant is supposed to be suggestive.

Smart kid, right? I’ve raised him right. And yet he’s never been to a Hooters and, at least until those teenage hormones kick in, he doesn’t think it’s a place he’d even want to go. And my teenage daughter, who’s a feminist and a modest dresser and generally against exploitative sexuality, would insist on staying in the car, probably along with my wife, who’d be seething that I brought her to Hooters in the first place.

Going to Chili’s? My family’s on board.

But Hooters? If they’re really trying to bring families back in, it might be a good idea to do some consumer research instead of trying to return to their roots, because I think their vibe is the least of their problems.

When I look at consumer complaints about them on the internet, no one’s saying “I wish Hooters was more like it used to be” – it’s usually that the service is slow and not very good, that the company doesn’t respond well to customer complaints and that the food quality is spotty at best. I see complaints about missing items not being replaced, food being prepared with spoiled produce or being cooked improperly, and portions being stingy, especially with their signature wings, appetizers and mixed drinks.

And there are also a number of servers who’ve worked for the restaurant who’ve complained over the years about being harassed by customers and managers, who have felt discriminated against if they didn’t have the right body type and who don’t feel safe walking to their cars. The consensus seems to be that the money is good, but that the job itself is best for young women starting out in the workforce who are willing to put up with everything that working at Hooters entails.

To me, the smart thing for Hooters to do would be to ditch the overt sexuality, focus on improving the experience of eating there and make sure the food is a great value. They can still keep their fun beach restaurant culture, their sense of humor and their fried foods – those seem to be the things people like. And with some proper research guiding them, I think Hooters is a well-known enough brand that they could pull off a family-focused pivot.

Unfortunately, their new parent company, Original Hooters, seems to be stuck in the 1980s mentality of telling people what they want instead of asking them. That worked in an era of conformity and sticking with the in-crowd.

But in 2026? As my kids said, it’s kinda cringe, bruh.

I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!

PLUG

This month I’m plugging the St. Louis Area Foodbank, which is a not-for-profit organization that gathers and distributes food to over 500 food pantries, homeless shelters, soup kitchens and community program partners in the Greater St. Louis Area. This is a time of year when people are fighting not just the cold, but also the hunger that comes with higher heating bills, and supporting a food bank is a great way to have a powerful impact on your local community.

Over 40 million people in America struggle with food security and rely on government programs and charitable services to put food on their tables. Food banks are also facing more hardship than ever before due to operational strains from late 2025 due to the government shutdown and increased demand for assistance. They need us to step up and be donors and volunteers, and I encourage you to, at the very least, donate a few bucks today to help out.

While I always recommend supporting local food banks if you can, the St. Louis Area Foodbank is also a great choice because they provide so much support to so many organizations and are extremely transparent about how they utilize their funds. They have a perfect score on CharityNavigator and are an accredited charity with the Better Business Bureau and a partner with the United Way and Feeding America.

You can learn more at http://stlfoodbank.org/