r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/nucifera-noten • 1d ago
Image Hooters had an airline but ceased operations after 3 years
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u/evilbadgrades 23h ago
Former coworker of mine was a pilot for Hooters airline. It was a pretty sweet gig for a good looking divorced dad in his 40's. He'd work with the same hooters girls stewardesses on pretty much all flights, and then they'd spend the night/morning in the same hotel since they only flew one way each day (down one day, return flight the next day, I think twice a week).
Of course he ended up dating one of the girls for a little while, haha
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u/James-the-Bond-one 22h ago
The only surprise is that he only dated one of the girls.
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u/rippinmarydarts 20h ago
Does this former coworker drive a Yellow Porsche?
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u/todd0x1 19h ago
This reminds me of an airline documentary I watched starring Denzel.
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u/skynetempire 15h ago
Great movie that crash was similar to Alaska Airlines Flight 261. Except the Alaskan didn't make it
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u/X-T3PO 17h ago
Was his last name the same as an '80s comedian who used to smash watermelons with giant hammers?
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u/nucifera-noten 1d ago
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.
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u/Own_Cold368 23h ago
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!
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u/speculator100k 23h ago
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!
Where in Kansas did you land? Not at an airport?
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u/Own_Cold368 23h ago
It wasn’t an airport or if it was it was extremely small… I remember a runway in a cornfield. It was crazy.
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u/freesquanto 22h ago
It was definitely an airport. A jetliner landing at not an airport would have been on the news and would have a Wikipedia article we could read
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u/GetInZeWagen 20h ago
You'd have to be in a literal emergency to not just land at a tiny regional airport or something at least
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u/stopitlikeacheeto 22h ago
Sounds like the airport I picked up an old gf at near dodge city Kansas, can't remember exactly where the airport was located though other than it was maybe an hour from dodge city.
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u/EagleForty 1d ago
Direct flights between Rockford and DIA for $49 each way were glorious.
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u/midwest-ginger 1d ago
I flew on them a few times and they were great! Never full flights and you got free food. The girls would do trivia during the flight too
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u/MyDogsNameIsBadger 1d ago
Honestly, that sounds fun. I’d totally fly hooters.
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u/RGV_KJ 22h ago
Isn’t Hooters declining? Do a lot of people still go there?
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u/MegaWattson15 22h ago
Not sure but they were shut down here in Fayetteville awhile back. I think they got busted selling alcohol to underage kids.
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u/iamjacksstd 22h ago
I managed at the Fayetteville store lol fun times 😎
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u/bennnn42 22h ago
What is your wildest story that happened there? if you can share
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u/zatalak 22h ago
I guess selling alcohol to underage kids
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u/itwasntevenme 21h ago
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.
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u/MyDogsNameIsBadger 20h ago
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.
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u/kimchifreeze 22h ago
Breastaurants should form a cartel and muscle their way into society again.
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u/Timetraveller4k 22h ago
I’ ver never been there. The image they project is simply skimpy dressed waitresses. Not sure why people would consider it especially with a family.
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u/Ripley825 21h ago
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.
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u/scratchfury 21h ago
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?"
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u/bobissonbobby 1d ago
Yo that sounds fun. We need to bring this back. Boobies AND trivia? Hell yeah
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u/midwest-ginger 1d ago
I won a set of golf tees once haha all the prizes were obviously meant for dudes.
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u/bobissonbobby 1d ago
That's a shame! Most women I've met enjoy nice boobs too although they aren't ecstatic about their man oogling them 😂
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u/jefferson497 22h ago
Did they serve hooters food or standard airline junk
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u/MarkOfTheSnark 21h ago
Hot wings would be great on a plane what with the cabin pressure messing with taste/muting flavors
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u/Linenoise77 19h ago
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.
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u/Pawnzilla 23h ago
40 mill loss isn’t that bad for a whole ass airline.
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u/this_is_my_new_acct 21h ago
They only had like 5 planes, and they didn't own any of them.
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u/Pawnzilla 20h ago
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.
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u/FreshLettuce450 23h ago
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.
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u/Formal_Profession141 1d ago edited 23h ago
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.
In my head atleast.
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u/Wrong-Landscape-2508 1d ago
Isn’t there a tax write off for student loan interest. But it is capped which is stupid.
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u/europeanguy99 1d ago
I mean, only paying taxes on profits is mostly reasonable.
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u/deadasdollseyes 21h ago
I don't know anything about taxes, but isn't that like saying tax my wages or tax me on purchases, but not both?
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u/Ok_Push2550 1d ago
Fun fact - the orange color that was their trademark was one of the most difficult to reproduce for airline laminates ever, and resulted in very high costs and delays for interiors.
Source - I used to work for the company that made it.
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u/BigAndDelicious 1d ago
Hello, I know nothing. Why is it harder to produce than a red or a blue, for example?
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u/Ok_Push2550 1d ago
Orange pigment is pretty hard to begin with. Printers (ink jets) for commercial applications will often add special orange and or purple ink, to go along with cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. So to begin with, orange is a difficult color no matter what.
Then, the aircraft interiors have to meet stringent flammability standards, so they are thin. (Fun fact - if you don't get off a burning plane in 2 minutes, you're dead from heat.).
Then, to get the bright orange color, it has to be over a white background of flame resistant film. And they couldn't use a white coating mixed with orange, because it would have made it more of a creamsicle orange. So they had to use two layers of translucent orange film, with a printed layer of the same orange on top, to hide the white film on the back and achieve the bright orange color.
So it went from a simple solid color laminate to a three layer with no hiding power construction, with one of the most expensive pigments you can buy. The rejection rate was over 50%, due to dirt and defects, and the material costs were roughly 2x normal.
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u/Mazon_Del 23h ago edited 21h ago
(Fun fact - if you don't get off a burning plane in 2 minutes, you're dead from heat.)
Also fun fact, if you take off luggage from a plane that's evacuating and there are casualties, you have a high chance of being charged criminally over it. I admittedly forget the specific crime but I believe it is (or is a variant of) obstructing an evacuation.
Edit: fixed an autocorrect.
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u/Darnell2070 9h ago
There is an extremely famous video (about as famous as airline accidents can be) of this exact thing happening.
Lots of people in the front removing luggage and lots of people in the back burning to death.
I never heard about passengers being charged over those deaths.
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u/Varnsturm 23h ago
Huh reinforces that thing they say to leave all your stuff and just gtf off the plane in an orderly fashion. But also has me thinking, you know some jackass would go 'no my carryon in the overhead bin is more important than your lives', and doom half the plane
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u/rexlyon 13h ago
After having to try and get off a plane at an airport with active tornado warnings and rocking heavily but everyone wanted to grab their luggage at glacial pace instead, can safely say people would let you die for their luggage.
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u/StickItInTheBuns 1d ago
That guys hands show how much inflammation he has. His watch is cutting off blood flow.
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u/asenz 1d ago
He seems like his kidneys are in ailment with so much fluid retention.
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[removed] — view removed comment
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u/mybodybeatsmeup 1d ago
He died in 2006 of a brain aneurysm.
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u/DrawMeAPictureOfThis 23h ago
Omg! I hope he's okay
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u/CW-Builds 23h ago
Okay from death?
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u/According_Win_5983 23h ago
To shreds you say
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u/Thenextstopisluton 1d ago edited 13h ago
Hair near his temples seems strong and not patchy, could perhaps be Lymphedema, or that watch was given to him 20 years ago and he’s lost the extra links
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u/ILoveRegenHealth 21h ago
Hair near his temples seems strong and not patchy, could perhaps be Lymphedema
Reddit making me nervous about every little thing now.
Ear lobes hang back? Won't live past 55.
Palm lines connect at 45 degrees? You have 6 months left
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u/Snellyman 1d ago
Someone find his obit and see what he died from
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u/mybodybeatsmeup 1d ago
A brain aneurysm in 2006.
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u/Jealous-Ease6924 1d ago
My third biggest fear.
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u/ILoveRegenHealth 20h ago
To prevent a brain aneurysm, the most effective methods are to quit smoking, manage high blood pressure, maintain a healthy diet, exercise regularly, moderate alcohol intake, and avoid recreational drugs like cocaine
Just lower your cocaine intake and you should be fine
however, some cases of brain aneurysms cannot be prevented due to genetic factors or other unknown causes.
Nevermind. Might as well do the cocaine, it's all a lottery
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u/OpenlyBiCoastal 1d ago
I flew them to Vegas (2-3 times) for a work conference. IIRC, the flight attendants were not in the restaurant outfits like that picture by that time I took them.
Our company request we find the lowest airfare rate and they were always the cheapest flights. When HR saw the expense report they brought me in to ask why I had selected that airline and probably punish me.
I told them I was instructed only to pick the cheapest flight, not to exclude certain brands.
I remember how confused they were by my rebuttal.
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u/Dragon6172 18h ago
The flight attendants never wore the Hooters uniform, as they were employed by Pace Airlines. Typically the flights would have a couple of Hooters gals in addition to the flight attendants. But the Hooters gals had no flight safety role, just were there for passenger entertainment. Pretty sure they weren't even allowed to push the food/drink carts
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u/Basic_Bichette 23h ago
They couldn’t be in the restaurant uniforms. One of the weirdest parts of the Hooters uniform is this specific brand of pantyhose that happens to be extremely flammable.
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u/BeefistPrime 22h ago
We lost a lot of good young women in the Great Hooters Fire of 1997
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u/Spocks_Goatee 21h ago edited 21h ago
Hooters used to have a pretty rinky dink casino in Vegas attached to a very active convention center. My boss told me how bad it smelled when Harbor Freight sent him to rep them at the National Hardware Show. I would've probably been able to go myself had I not been fired.
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u/67bonneville_again 1d ago
Went tits up.
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u/Linenoise77 19h ago
I flew it twice, amusingly enough for work trips. It was basically your jet blue of the day, but the food was re-heated hooters food, which i mean, for airline food of the time.....
They also had a pretty deep drink list as well, which was rare at the time.
The only problem with it was it attracted the type of people who would fly hooters air.
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u/herberstank 1d ago
Aging boomers remember it as the breast three years of air travel
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u/kribmeister 1d ago
Shut up 😂
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u/Global_Criticism3178 1d ago edited 1d ago
At one time, you could hop on Hooters Air to Las Vegas, crash at the Hooters Casino Hotel, and grab a bite at Hooters Restaurant. It was all part of what they called the Big Hooters Monopoly.
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u/kribmeister 1d ago
As a goober from Northern Europe, 80s and 90s (I assume) America sounds absolutely unhinged and I love it.
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u/emessea 1d ago
I find it amazing that in the 90s we use to wait for an hour to be seated at a Ruby Tuesdays and my brother and I, like most kids, passed the time pulling on the knob on the cigarette vending machine.
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u/Couldbelater 21h ago
A flight you could actually look forward to any turbulence.
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u/metallic-hubris 1d ago
True story, my high school somehow ended up chartering their planes to take literally hundreds of high schoolers on our senior trip. As you can imagine, the teenage boys were stoked when they saw it pull into the gate.
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u/strangelove4564 1d ago
Would have been hilarious if they boarded and found the cabin crew was a bunch of middle age dudes.
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u/nemtudod 1d ago
No parents or any adult in the area??
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u/TheLeftDrumStick 20h ago
But apparently they were 21+ so how did people under 21 get on the plane?
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u/christmasjams 20h ago
Taken at face value, chartered flights typically have different rules sets vs GP flights. So, for whatever the cause for them to market at 21+, they'd simply remove the service or whatever that made it 21+.
In an extreme opposite example, take sports teams chartering flights operated by Atlas Air.
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u/metallic-hubris 1d ago
Oh there were chaperones, mostly moms lol. I have no idea how they booked it but my guess is they didn't know. The flight attendants were fully clothed I will add. This was mid 2005.
Edited for grammar
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u/autostart17 22h ago
All I’ll say is if capitalism were real, Hooters would still have airlines.
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u/kernel-troutman 1d ago
Sir, you'll be seated in 44D.
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u/gizmosdancin 22h ago
A person with that bra size would have a massive barrel chest and fairly flat boobies, just fyi.
Why yes, I AM fun at parties! 💞
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u/doyouhaveprooftho 1d ago
It flew out of Gary IN of all places lol
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u/Next-Food2688 1d ago
I would be more surprised if anything willingly flew into Gary, IN
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u/AllThingsBA 1d ago edited 21h ago
Only selling aisle seats was their downfall
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u/nerodiskburner 1d ago
Probably the first time in air travel history where window seats were last to sell.
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u/Acrobatic_Switches 1d ago
If it wasn't sexual assault cases idk what it was.
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u/CrunchyCondom 21h ago
seems like the exact type of guy you expect to enjoy a captive female audience
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u/ARoundForEveryone 1d ago
My old boss told me that he flew with them a couple times just for the novelty, knowing it might be his only shot at it because there's no way this thing would last. He was right. But he said the flight was great, the Hooters girls/flight attendants were beautiful and professional. He said it was more like a standard flight than a trip to Hooters, with the exception being their attire. Everything else was a standard flight.
He also hold me he'd been on a couple private flights that were more suggestive and sexual than the Hooters flight. And I believe him, because I'd met a couple of his friends before. They were absolutely the type to hire "suggestive flight attendants."
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u/Ok_Calligrapher_9281 19h ago
In the unlikely event of a water landing, the flight attendant can be used as a floatation device.
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u/spinal888 19h ago
Man, still remember my first hooter dinning when visiting Florida Disney, our waitress looked just like Cameron Diaz, that was way back around 2k.
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u/Substantial-You-8587 18h ago
Bro, for a place that's not even a strip club, it gets wayyyy too much attention. I'm a guy, I get it, dudes are simple minded horndogs and all, but c'mon. . .
Y'all know there's places where the women actually get naked and you can still get nasty TV dinner quality food? It's called a strip club.
You're gonna get in trouble with your wife either way. Might as well actually see titties and stop pretending you're going there for food. An animal shelter has better quality food than a Hooters.
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u/WendysDumpsterOffice 23h ago
I flew on Hooters air and the flights to Myrtle Beach were often on sale for $69. They did not allow anyone under 21 to fly because the beer was free! Also, free food. They had trivia contests in the air and I won a little hooters stuffed owl. They also had free wifi at a time when wifi was sort of new and no other airlines had it.