How about a restaurant offering significant discounts to ladies with a prominent breast zone? Yes, there is one in China which has launched an advertising campaign built upon this ingenious idea.
Starting at the beginning of August, the Trendy Shrimp restaurant situated in one of the malls in Hangzhou, a city on the coast of Zhejiang province, put out posters announcing discounts that grow with the size of ladies’ bras. The posters were so surprising that they earned a mention in the Qianjian Evening Post, and the news was picked up from there by other mass media, with very different responses.
The posters showed a line of female anime characters each one with a larger bosom than the one before her. The legend said that the city was on the outlook for breasts, proceeding to lay the details of the discount. They were going up with the letters, A-bra earning its owner a discount of 5%, every subsequent letter adding another 10% and the escalation going up to a whooping 65% for a G-cup! No wonder the posters attracted the public attention.
However, not all of the attention was positive – so many people hurried to express their dissatisfaction with what they considered to be a “discriminatory” approach. Complaints began to flood in, to the effect that the adverts were vulgar and did not offer similar kinds of discounts to large men.
Despite the negative reaction, Lan Sheggang, the Trendy Shrimp’s General Manager, reported excellent results of the astonishing strategy, the restaurant registering a 20% increase in customers since the beginning of the campaign.
According to Sheggang, discounts are given out solely by female waitresses so that there is no question of embarrassing customers – some of which proved to be actually proud of their bodies and did not wish to hide their beauty.
Chinese restaurants have thought of this stunning scheme before – a Chongqing place used to promote its services before by cutting down the bill depending on the weight of the customer; the men got larger discounts if they were heavier, the women got them for being slim. They went as far as giving free meals to men weighing over 140 kg (308 lbs) and women who weighed under 34.5 kg (76 lbs).
A different idea was utilized by the management of a restaurant in Zhengzhou, Henan – they elected the best-looking customers who had their meals without paying for them. As people entered the place, they were photographed, and judges with the local cosmetic surgery salon chose the most attractive diners. The five who were decreed the most beautiful enjoyed their food for free.
