Receipt Art: May 23, 2010

Hooters encourages their servers to make each and every customer's visit to Hooters one of a kind.  This is hardly new news - I've spoken of this before.  After all Hooters food can be rather forgettable (though I honestly do love a lot of it), but the experience lies in the interaction rather than the meal.  It's the Hooters Girl's job to create this memorable interaction and she is encouraged to do this pretty much anyway she pleases.  This is one of the things I love about Hooters, there is a certain amount of creative freedom that allows each and every one of us to use our strengths and personalities to achieve our job.  While this can involve the Hooters standards - hula-hooping, dancing, more hula-hooping - it can also involve more irregular things like playing your guitar or making balloon animals or even doing origami if that's your thing.  Hooters lets the Hooters Girl shine.

Now I do a lot of different little personal things for my guests.  For example, every Friday I bring my guitar.  People know this and they come to see it.  It's my thing.  But in addition to this I bring candy to hand out guests (Laffy Taffy is my favorite because the jokes are a conversation starter) and fold each and every paper towel into a mini "sleeping bag" for silverware.  Do other girls do this?  No, I'm the only one.  They have their own things.  That's the point.

Perhaps one of my guests favorite things that I do is I draw on EVERY receipt I hand out.  Each and every one gets a drawing whether I'm busy or slow or happy or pissed or whatever.  The other girls think I'm nuts.  They write thank you and their name and maybe a heart or two and there I am drawing a masterpiece.  But the thing is that people love it.  They turn over the receipt and it's like a little surprise every time.  Sometimes the drawings are random, sometimes they relate to the weather or current season, sometimes they deal with sports and sometimes they somehow relate to conversation we've had at the table.  These are the best receipts because not only did I take the time to draw something there, but I took the time to pay enough attention to what you were saying to draw something relevant.  It's a gift.

Today as a customer turned over their receipt they said, "You should have a website of these.  It'd be cool to see them all and I bet people would like it."

Little did he know, I already have a blog.  How very handy!  So I'll be presenting some of my receipt artworks here from time to time just for the heck of it.  Here is my first of what is hopefully many.  It features a spring theme.

Note that the receipt circles the total as well as the employee name (obviously taken out in this image).  This is uniform across all my drawings, the artwork will always feature the total and my name prominently within the image.  This way, the important stuff is still easily identified.  It's just prettified too!