There's an increased awareness of sexual harassment

Usually, when you announce where you're headed for dinner, it's met with a bit of excitement and — hopefully — agreement. Announce to the family you'd like to go to Hooters, though, and it might be met with doubt and a disapproving scowl. There's no denying that Hooters — with their scantily-clad waitresses and looks-based hiring practices — has always targeted a certain client base.
It's hard to believe they've been doing it for more than 30 years, and according to USA Today, they haven't aged well. They called Hooters "a fading relic of the 1980s," and they've been on a very slow downward slide for a long time. There's only one year in recent memory that they saw a sales increase, and even then it was just a pretty sad one percent. In 2008, they had 400 restaurants. By 2011, they had closed 35 locations and lost an annual revenue of more than $100 million (via Time). Between 2012 and 2016 they closed a further seven percent of their locations, says Business Insider. So what's going on with this bro-centric breastaurant?

BrandIndex is a company that surveys a wide customer base across dozens of industries in order to determine what's trending and what's not. They took a hard look at Hooters in 2013, and what they found was pretty hilarious… or would be, if it wasn't so dismal.
Customers were asked to rate Hooters on a scale of 100 to -100, and as of 2013, women rated the chain at a pretty sad -21. That might not be surprising, but how about the guys? Their average score clocked in at an almost equally sad 2, climbing a bit from the -3 they scored just a few months prior.
And that's a big deal. According to American Marketing Association CEO and restaurant expert Russ Klein, getting rid of any taboo associated with Hooters is key. And that taboo? The numbers say it exists with guys, too.

Do you know what's not good for any company's image? People staging protests and picketing your plans to open new locations.
That's exactly what happened when Hooters announced they were expanding in the UK. In 2010, protesters started campaigning against the imminent opening of a Hooters in Cardiff, with one spokesperson saying (via The Guardian), "Everyone should have a job but they should be good jobs with dignity. Not only is it a sexist institution, but it encourages a sexist culture." (In spite of protests, The Guardian also reported the chain opened there a few months later.)
Wales wasn't the only country to protest Hooters, and in 2010 Marks & Spencer was threatened with boycott when a Bristol location announced they would sublet space to Hooters (via The Telegraph). A Birmingham location was only open for a year before closing, and Sheffield's Hooters got such strong opposition that it never even opened. The Independent called it "the feminist nightmare" when they reported on Scotland's condemnation of the chain as a "degrading spectacle" in 2008, saying that people from government officials to students weren't happy about the idea of getting one in their town.

Hooters' message of objectifying women (something Salon notes they were once quite upfront about on their own website, on a page that's now gone) has never looked more dated than it does post-2017. Thanks to movements like #MeToo, Time's Up, and Time Magazine's naming of The Silence Breakers as 2017's Person of the Year, the world is suddenly listening to women who are sick and tired of suffering sexual assault and harassment in silence. And that makes the hot pants and low-cut tops of Hooters' waitresses even more uncomfortable.
The presence of a Hooters restaurant and an increase in the potential for sexual assault was connected by Cathy Jamieson, deputy leader of the Scottish Labour Party. She noted (via The Independent), "Violence against women is a big problem… and these types of establishments do nothing to promote equality of women in the workplace." Feminist academic Carol J Adams went even further, saying, "It makes the degradation of women appear playful and harmless… thus everyone can enjoy the degradation of women without being honest."