This story appears in the
December 2004 issue of
Entrepreneur.
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Bald isn't just beautiful-it's also economic.
Restaurateur Gary Arnold, 52, saw to that earlier this year when he
began offering balding customers a discount on Wednesdays. People
with half their hair receive a 50 percent discount, and for Kojak
lookalikes, the whole enchilada is free. Gary's Uptown
Restaurant and Bar in Lodi, California, has received a ton of
national press, and the customers "have a lot of fun,"
says co-owner and Arnold's wife, Debra, 39.
But marketing gimmicks can backfire. In 1999, another
restaurant, Casa Sanchez in San Francisco, began offering a free
burrito a day for life to anybody who would get a tattoo of their
restaurant's logo-a boy wearing a sombrero and riding a
fiery corncob. But the owners stopped after 40 people because they
calculated that if each person took them up on the offer for the
next 50 years, it would cost $5.8 million. And this year, the state
of New Jersey banned "Ladies Night" in bars because six
years ago, a litigious man learned he had to pay $5 to get into a
bar, while women paid $1.
"Businesses shouldn't spend much time worrying,"
says Central Michigan University law professor Theodore Bolema.
"But there is a big difference between discriminating based on
a protected class, such as ladies night, vs. discrimination based
on a nonprotected category"-like bald men.
However, woe to all of us if more nonprotected categories are
protected, warns Wayne Schaffel, a New York City PR expert who
specializes in the hospitality and food and beverage industries:
"Does happy hour discriminate against people who work from 5
to 7 p.m.? This is not a good precedent."