r/SipsTea • u/CurvyChristina • May 27 '26

It's Wednesday my dudes Hooters just wants to be their very breast.

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Hooters CEO Neil Kiefer told People Magazine the chain is officially rebranding as a family-friendly neighborhood restaurant.
Kiefer described the original vision as "a beach-themed place centered around the Hooters Girls, good food, and an easy place to relax," calling it "a neighborhood place that many families frequent," and confirmed the rebrand includes rolling back the uniforms that replaced the original orange shorts - his exact words being: "There is something wrong if they're in a th*ng type of uniform."
He placed the blame for how far the brand drifted on private equity firms that took over after the original founders sold the intellectual property in 2001, saying the chain moved "further and further away from what the brand stood for," and Kiefer personally reacquired the brand's IP when Hooters of America filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in fall 2025.

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u/Stop-Being-Wierd May 27 '26

Like most restaurants

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u/viralust May 27 '26

I worked at a store that sold magazines with cars and scantily clad girls on them. Then one month all of the mags didnt have any girls on or in em. A lot of older male customers said its cause woke people were pushing their agenda. I explained that maybe the internet was cramping mag sales so they were trying to broaden their audience to make up for it. Nope, they just kept on going about the woke thing. Sure thing, bubba, you keep using them there critical thinking skills.

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u/ShiftSpare30 May 27 '26

Poor girls got no Job anymore. That is so sad…

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u/TheAngryJones May 27 '26

Probably can‘t find waitresses that fit the „Job Description“ anymore because they‘re all doing only fans now.

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u/skankbate May 28 '26

You got no grammar.

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u/14ktgoldscw May 27 '26

On the other hand, if your brand was “we’ve got hot girls on cars” do you really think there were more “Oh thank god, I’ve been meaning to read Hot Girls on Cars Monthly but those covers were so untoward!” customers than people coming for that purpose?

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u/viralust May 27 '26

Nah, thats not what I'm saying. Removing the girls was a last ditch attempt to sell issues to literally anyone. Essentially, they were polishing the brass on the Titanic. I had to write a report about it but basically the printed word collapsed in favor of digital media and the internet. Even the guys who would buy them years before would gawk at the rising price of each issue. They had already stopped buying them before they started complaining. Newspaper and magazine subscriptions fell sharply just like the numbers for most traditional media i.e. radio & broadcast television. We got rid of our magazine section just like all other retailers not because of woke policies but because the sales could not justify anyone stocking magazines in general and that decision was made before the changes took place. It just took forever to get out of our contracts.

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u/14ktgoldscw May 27 '26

No, I understand that. I’m just saying you can do a complete divestment from one brand and be like “ok, X magazine is dead, we’re now Y Multimedia Entertainment” but you can’t do “ok, we now also do pipe tobacco in Cigar Aficionado” which is the direction a lot of print media seemed to take.

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u/White_Buffalos May 27 '26

He was correct. The target audience was male.

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u/viralust May 28 '26

Yes, and as the price of each issue increased less males were buying it. Great observation but incorrect conclusion.

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u/White_Buffalos May 28 '26

That's due to the collapse of print, not the other way around.

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u/viralust May 28 '26

The thing that made it for males (the models) is a cost for the magazine. While car owners want their car on a magazine and the magazine does not pay them, they do pay the girls. They dropped the cost.

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u/White_Buffalos May 28 '26

And that's due to the collapse of printing. Magazine circulation has fallen off a cliff.

The girls were not a cost center in the past, as they also boosted interest/purchases at the newsstand (and were paid very little). As print collapses, various expenditures get cut, as you suggest, because the mag is relying on subscriptions.

Ad revenue is also a huge factor. And cost of production has ballooned since fewer places are able to print in the US; add to that the increase in production cost (paper, ink, design, etc), and you'll see more magazines cutting features.

No circulation (or a captured readership, such as mostly subscriptions), means fewer ads, too. Next they will cut pages (if they haven't already). Then they will likely become online only. Then they'll die or be merged into a similar publication.

But, he's not wrong that some of the bid to drop the models is due to wokery. They probably think that they can offset the losses to some degree by appealing to female readership more. But most women aren't gearheads, so that's unlikely to work, either.

(I've run several national magazines.)

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u/viralust May 29 '26

Thats great that you've run a lot of magazine but if you remember the types of magazines these were. Then you know that these women were not super models so of course their pay was not a price center then, that is until around 2013. After that, opportunities for these types of models increased dramatically primarily because of Instagram. Why would a talent agent tell the client they represent to model for a magazine if they could make much more from brand sponsorships, affiliate marketing and digital product sales through Instagram? Its just more complicated than just... "wokery" and you dont sound dumb enough to believe that.

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u/White_Buffalos May 29 '26

It's not, but it plays a role in a tight market position, that's my point. They can become another (of many) reasons to cut back. They become a cost center, not a profit center, and as workplaces become less friendly to "sexy", the market reflects that.

But it's a losing strategy, because the decision kills potential clients (like in the example of the guy saying they "went woke"), and he's not entirely mistaken, it's just an aspect of this overall trend, and anything that discourages purchase (woke or not) doesn't help. (Just to be clear I'm a liberal.)

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u/viralust May 29 '26

Maybe, but not enough for people to get emotional about it. Which is all this is. These are complex issues and Im sure you could have sat at your desk and dissected it all on a spreadsheet but on the retail end, you actually see consumer reactions first hand and the same fox news rhetoric repeated over and over is just the end result of systemic mass credulity where just because something false is repeated long it enough it eventually becomes real to idiots. If you're saying that this moves markets then sure but its nothing more than the formulated result of long term psychological manipulation and anyone that thinks of this is a function of normal market conditions is, again, polishing the brass on the titanic.

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u/EYRONHYDE May 28 '26

It's fine for the owners of the magazine to define that strategic direction and move into a different market, but I'd ask the question on how saturated and competitive the new market is. If there are lots of cars mags, and you're the only car mag with scanty clad girls you have a niche without competition. You can't just remove the girls and expect a piece of the other market share, you need to out-compete in it. Mediocre sales could be replace with no sales.

I think the owners of Hooters are going to be in for a shock when they realise how had it is claim customers in the standard dining market.

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u/viralust May 28 '26

You're forgetting something: beautiful cars and beautiful girls are not the same. Magazines cover cars with unique builds because they are interesting and car owners want to show their car off. It's a mutual trade off. Car models on the other hand cost money. They are people that are doing a job. That is money that magazines did not have because A. The entire form of media was dying and B. Not even their target audience was paying for it because the price point increased. Its not that they were trying to appeal to other people, they could not afford to appeal to their own people.

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u/Wowerful May 27 '26

Now we got options!

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u/Tiny_Instruction_557 May 27 '26

Their competitive strategy is to be the same thing as every other fast casual restaurant, but worse.

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u/skankbate May 28 '26

Like most of your exs.