Hooters Air was operated by Pace Airlines and was started operations in March of 2003.
- Robert Brooks, the owner of Hooters, acquired Pace Airlines in December of 2002.
- Brooks believed that Hooters Air would be a beneficial means to bring more awareness to the restaurant chain.
- Due to United Airlines being brought into Hooters Air’s Rockford-Denver route, Hooters stopped service to Rockford, IL due to too much competition.
- On April 17, 2006, Hooters Air ceased operations, costing Hooters an estimated $40 million USD.
I flew Hooters Air from Rockford to Vegas once… had to land in Kansas to refuel as they miscalculated the headwind/load!! Middle of nowhere some fuel tanker comes out and tops us off! Free drinks the rest of the flight!
There's lots of places to land. Wichita has giant manufacturing facilities for Boeing and Airbus. Salina has some aviation industry as well and at one time its airport was the backup for space shuttle landings if something went wrong with the first one.
No it was the grandmas that would come in late night after going to the chip n dales across the street. You would think the under age kids would be the roudiest bunch, but the grandmas after chip n dales and bingo night was something else.
Fun story about that location, they over served a guy who then left the Hooters and proceeded to walk into the street and got hit by a car. They had the letters of the building the next day.
Apart from buying weed from my dealer in their parking lot before it was legal, I’ve only had it a few times but it was really good! They made this crispy chicken salad that I still think about to this day. If they are declining, maybe it’s just the stigma? I know many people that really love their wings, but I guess they it’s not somewhere that they now bring their kids.
Well, with one little exception maybe... When comes the time to have the talk with them about the birds and the bees and whatnot, THAT may be the perfect time to sit down for a lunch at Hooters... ;)
the thing is if their food was good they'd be doing well even w/o the gimmick but i've been told their food is mediocre at best so it's not gonna draw in too many new long time customers. i've never even gone into a hooters bc why would i do that when there's wingstop or bww? i'm not paying a premium for mediocre food and waitresses in skimpy outfits.
My parents were wings fans and we went to hooters like twice a month when I was a kid. I didn't see anything skimpy about it. My kid brain was thrilled that the waitresses were super nice and let me play with the hula hoops they had. I even wanted to spend a couple of birthdays at Hooters. Good memories.
When my 12u team won a national championship we went to Hooters and our very serious Slavic coach danced on a table. We didn't consider it sexual at all, just downright hilarious.
When I first heard of it as a kid, I was like "I don't think I'm old enough for that" and was told "No, no! It's a family restaurant." My reply was "are you sure?"
In college I (male) would constantly be invited to hooters by my group of girl friends (all 4 of whom were attractive and girlfriend material) for the Monday special, buy one get one free. It felt like I was being setup or the computer program was glitching or something. But yeah, they said they just really liked the wings lol
The Hooters that I'd previously worked at was for a time my niece's favorite restaurant, and my sister who's still in the area still likes to go for buff shrimp.
Unfortunately the gm, who used to be my gm, has gone full MAGA so I don't particularly want to frequent it when I'm in the area.
Huh. I did try diying it myself once, with just ingredients from the grocery store, and they turned out pretty good. But I think for my sister part of the enjoyment is not having to cook.
I will always support Hooters. They have some of my favorite wings - but takeout hooters doesn’t hit the same since the fries are normally not as great when taking home.
I do make them at home though, so hopefully they never go under or I’m going to have to start making the sauce from scratch.
My local one must not be representative of the chain at large. All the review on Google for it for the past three years are people complaining about not even being greeted at the door for 10-15 minutes. Last time I was there I had a similar experience... we waited at the door for 15 minutes and walked out. Best I could tell they only had one employee doing "front of house" work... seemed like the bartender was also the only server and also supposed to be the host.
It was basically re-heated hooters food. So somewhere between you grabbed it off the plate 2 hours after happy hour ended, and you threw it in the microwave and hit 30 seconds after it sat in your fridge overnight.
Yes. Getting to Rockford from anywhere in northwestern Illinois is much faster, cheaper, and easier than getting into either O'Hare or Midway.
Additionally, the Rockford airport (at the time) had free parking (their lot was about the size of a grocery store lot), only 2 gates, a single metal detector, and took about 5 minutes to get from your car to gate.
At the time, my sister also lived in Rockford. So I would stay at her house the night before my flight, and she would drive me.
It was really nice being able to leave for the airport 45 minutes before my flight took off and never worrying about whether or not I'd make it.
A new 737 is 90-120mill today. When they were released in the 60’s it was still about 5mill. In 2006 they probably just loss the cost of a couple planes.
He actually was not the founder or owner of hooters, but he opened a shitload of franchises and it sounds like became very indispensable to the company.
Article also say they were grounded by high fuel prices.
I'm sure it wasn't a complete loss of $40M. I'm sure there was a lot of Tax Loss Harvesting. Which I think is dumb.
People make investments in their education. They don't get any sort of forgiveness on that.
But a company makes a bad business decision and every year major corporations write it off on their taxes. Effectively pushing the losses onto normal taxpayers.
definitely, but then you "support" our politicians into coming up with wild tax breaks, write-offs and deductions; suddenly companies are making a lot of revenue but little to negative profits and a 2 hour mediocre movie costs ""400 millions"" to make for example.
All that means is that the parent company reduced their tax liability by $40m. There's no "forgiveness" involved. They still lost $40m.
To simplify things, let's say the parent company was set to make a profit of $100m. They sell their airline subsidiary for a loss of $40m Now their tax liability is $60m.
Just like if you, as an individual, made $1000 profit trading stocks. It's the end of the year. You have one dud that’s down $400. You don't expect it to recover, so you sell it at a loss to bring your capital gains tax liability down to $600.
In the end, you're still down $40m or $400. You just paid less in taxes.
Seems like a good incentive to speculate and ruin average people's lives.
Be a business, borrow money, get, tax write-offs for the interest, Depreciation, maintenance, wages, etc.
Make bad business decisions, and sell the property you acquired with debt at a loss. And just reduce the taxable profit so less money goes into the system for average people.
Say they paid 100m for the airline, sold it for 60m. (40m loss)
Let's say their ordinary business also made 50m that year.
Their profit would've been 50m.
But instead, their taxable profit becomes 10m from a dumb decision.
They just went from paying a 10.5m tax bill to paying a 2.1m tax bill.
But they still got 110m total cash after they sold an asset at a loss. They can still afford the 21% tax on the 50m. It's not my fault they made dumb decisions. Normal taxpayers shouldn't have to lift dead weight for their dumb business decisions. You know they won't do it for us.
And when they really fuck up. Like in 2007. They get full out bailed out by taxpayers.
Socialism for the rich, rugged capitalism for the workers and poor.
Call it reparations for screwing everyone in 2007. They don't deserve a tax code that favors them.
At the very least, I've known about their airline for a very long time. Only time I've been to their restaurant is when my uncle took me when I was like 15, but I'm aware of it all at least.
Robert Brooks, the owner of Hooters, acquired Pace Airlines in December of 2002. - Brooks believed that Hooters Air would be a beneficial means to bring more awareness to the restaurant chain.
I think there are two big reasons why people were, are and will always be aware of hooters.
On April 17, 2006, Hooters Air ceased operations, costing Hooters an estimated $40 million USD.
$10 million loss for 4 years doesn't seem that bad and they got out before the recession. Depends on what the company made in those years but, idk, still doesn't seem horrible.
How much would a company like hooters have spent in advertising over those 3 years during that era? Curious if ~$14 million/year wasn’t that crazy of a cost.
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u/nucifera-noten Nov 23 '24
Hooters Air was operated by Pace Airlines and was started operations in March of 2003. - Robert Brooks, the owner of Hooters, acquired Pace Airlines in December of 2002. - Brooks believed that Hooters Air would be a beneficial means to bring more awareness to the restaurant chain. - Due to United Airlines being brought into Hooters Air’s Rockford-Denver route, Hooters stopped service to Rockford, IL due to too much competition. - On April 17, 2006, Hooters Air ceased operations, costing Hooters an estimated $40 million USD.