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Kid-friendly or X-rated
By Emily Brewer
Guest Columnist

Living in Winston-Salem for the majority of these past eight years, I have too often found myself saying good-bye to closing cafes and coffee houses, locally-owned original restaurant concepts and, this summer, to the North Point 5 Theater. Sadly, I have watched more and more chain restaurants march onto the landscape, challenging this city’s character and individuality.

Within the next few months, Hooters will join the list of the big-box "chain-gang" establishments out on Hanes Mall Boulevard.

Even though I will not patronize Winston-Salem’s choice new tenant, it seems I do not have to go further than our own Benson University Center to find Hooters free advertisement. On the first and sixth days of classes, representatives from the restaurant set up a distasteful recruiting table by the Pizza Hut entrance to the Benson — at first by invitation from James Buckley, the director of Benson, and subsequently without permission.

Hooters already has proved itself to be a bad neighbor by its unauthorized visit Sept. 4, it behooves us as a thinking community to examine the restaurant’s corporate practices as a whole to learn what it is that has raised the ire of graduate student Amber McCulloch in her column "Hooters recruiters not welcome on campus" (Sept. 5), myself and many others.

More than just another chain, this establishment markets sex appeal under the guise of a family-friendly restaurant.

It is the restaurant chain’s muddled identity I find most frustrating and insidious. On one hand the chain markets its buxom all-female wait staff and their scanty tight uniforms.

Some of the local Hooters around the country engage these employees in skimpy bikini contests on weekend nights and then turn them into calendar pin-ups, which are sold at the restaurants and on the Internet.

On the other hand, the restaurant offers children’s menus and occasionally advertises "Family Night" in order to attract moms and kids, who can munch on hot wings while Daddy ogles Miss February.

Strangely and inexplicably, the Hooters chain enjoys the same zoning classification as Applebee’s and Outback Steak House and thus can perch in commercial districts alongside tamer fare. This marketing strategy is at once brilliant and menacing. While the chain does not serve food in an atmosphere welcoming to families, it certainly is not a topless bar either.

The chain wades in murky waters that elude classification — so it can attract all clientele. How slyly this chain has marketed itself as "mainstream" in American communities when it is anything but.

What can be more insulting to communities — and to this country — than mass-produced tackiness? The chain delights in this tackiness, which, as part of its corporate mantra, it promotes with fanfare, dresses up in jumpsuit orange and celebrates with reckless abandon.

Hooters will meet with success in this city; there are sheep for every pasture. But let us at the university be diligent about keeping Hooters out by the mall and reserving university space for people and organizations conducive to the development of knowledge and service.

Emily Brewer, ‘98, is currently a graduate student of English.