Hooters CEO Doesn’t Understand Why His Manager is a Pig

On last night’s episode of Super Bowl lead-out “Undercover Boss,” Coby Brooks, the President and CEO of Hooters learned some important lessons via covert mingling with his rank-and-file. Of particular interest was his “confrontation” with douchebag Hooters manager Jimbo, which has been heavily teased in the show’s promos. Jimbo makes his Hooters girls perform demeaning acts to go home early, as Brooks looks on in shock.

Where did this guy ever get the idea he could treat women that way?

This would be funny were it not so completely nauseating. The CEO, Brooks, says early in the show that he’d have no problem with his own elementary-age daughters working at a Hooters someday. Let that sink in as you watch this recent Hooters ad that tells you what the restaurant is all about:

That’s right, it’s all about the tits! I mean, it’s right there in the name.

So, Brooks meets up with Jimbo, who’s such a douche, he drops two lame “Pulp Fiction” references in two minutes. Even in 1995, nobody thought “2 shakes of a lamb’s tail” was cool.

One thing Jimbo does understand, as Brooks points out, is the Hooters “brand.” (Tits.) He has the girls line up for inspection and sneers at their nails, quipping to one girl to “get another tattoo.” Brooks is only a bit fazed by Jimbo’s execution.

Then come the “reindeer games.” (Jimbo can’t even think of a decent Ben Affleck movie to reference.) He forces the girls to eat plates of beans without using their hands, to cries of “No!” and “This isn’t right.” He explains to Brooks, with accompanying pantomime, that he wants to “shove their faces down in the beans” because the girls are “prima donnas.”

Brooks, to his credit, really wants to do something, but he doesn’t want to “break cover.” Really? Does he think he’s Jack Bauer? Is the whole “op” gonna go south if he compromises himself?

But the best part is at the end, when Brooks does the big reveal, and tells Jimbo that he might not be comfortable having his daughters’ tits stared at on Jimbo’s watch. Awesomely, Jimbo (attired in a Hooters-colored leisure ensemble) pushes back by touting his record of sales before finally submitting.

I really love how Brooks’ only problem with it is that Jimbo isn’t using due process to single out the prima donnas.

The episode wraps up with Brooks announcing that he’s going to combat the company’s demeaning image with a PR campaign that will explain to people (and I’m not shitting you) that Hooters girls are not just Hooters girls, they’re people.

Look, it’s a free country, and this is all apparently legal, but when your entire business model depends on your employees welcoming sexual advances in writing, you kinda give up the right to be shocked that your manager is a pig.

For the uninitiated, Hooters isn’t just about skimpy outfits, hot girls, and hot wings. The waitresses are required to flirt with the patrons, at least according to their 2005 handbook, which states that their “job duties require that I interact with and entertain the customers” and that the Hooters concept is “based on female sex appeal and the work environment is one in which joking and entertaining conversations are commonplace.”

Molissa Farber, author of a criminology study centered around the “Hooters dynamic,” notes:

Hooters is an interesting laboratory – it trades on its sex appeal with scantily clad, busty waitresses, but it is also a franchise that insists on its legitimacy as a family restaurant. Hooters lies at the intersection of the service industry (in which the customer is always right) and the sex industry (which has a number of rules and norms that define and protect the sex worker). In preliminary ethnographic research, waitresses spoke of male customers’ bizarre requests, framed in the language of tipping. For example, one patron offered to add $20 to a waitress’s tip for every time she stepped on his foot under the table. This is not an offer one would make to a waitress at T.G.I. Friday’s. The Hooters Corporation does not officially address this kind of behavior, leaving the waitresses vulnerable.

CBS’ treatment of this subject is highly dissonant, regardless of your feelings about Hooters’ business model, whether you think it’s degrading or empowering. The show treats Coby Brooks’ journey to self-unawareness as some kind of uplifting triumph. In the end, all he does is issue a stern warning about literally treating his employees like swine, sends one nice lady he met on a vacation, and promises a PR campaign to remind people in “the community” that his company’s extensive collection of tits are attached to people.

How’s that working out? Well, today is “More than a mouthful Monday,” so you tell me.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.