Applying for a job as Hooters' Girl - part one

When an established Hooters breastaurant advertises for staff, you are encouraged to apply in person – obviously so they can assess what physical qualities you will bring to the team. However, as the Bristol (and Cardiff and Brighton) ones have yet to open their doors, the application process has been online. The downside for Hooters here being they don’t know what you look like.

Thankfully, Hooters decided to lease a room from @Bristol on the afternoon of Saturday, September 25 for three hours, to hold open interviews for prospective hostesses. It had very low-key advertising, and we only heard on the day before because someone who had applied had received an email saying:


“Thank you for your recent application to Hooters of Bristol via our website. Due to the volume of applicants we are holding an initial recruitment open day.

The event will be held at the - @Bristol, Anchor Road, Bristol, BS1 5DB (On the Harbourside) this Saturday the... 25th September between 1pm and 4pm.

You are invited to drop in and discuss our opportunities further with our management team. You will find us upstairs, just follow the signs!!!

We look forward to meeting you.”

(What a scary amount of exclamation points. !!!)

Well, we weren’t so keen on meeting them but felt after all this hype and publicity we’ve been helping to generate for them that it would only be polite to show our faces.  But before that, we quickly checked on the issue of @Bristol (a charity that rents its building from Bristol City Council) leasing a room to an exploitative breastaurant in order to recruit young staff, and pay them the minimum wage for such a demeaning and degrading job.

It was all especially concerning as, after the Dita Von Teese debacle at the Council-run Bristol Museum back in May, the council and its Chief Executive Jan Ormondroyd had promised Bristol Fawcett Society that nothing like this would ever happen again on council property. As a gesture, on Friday we learned Hooters had been told they could not put posters up of their girls anywhere on @Bristol. That’s OK then.

To be continued…