This is a tale of girls in bikinis, hot cups of coffee, and a giant chicken on crutches.
And, just to ensure it’s appropriate for the op-ed pages, it also involves government officials who seem strangely bent on putting their boots on the neck of an already down economy.
First, the funky chicken: As you may have read, the fine folks at PETA (who constantly remind us that meat is murder … tasty, tasty murder) want to install a giant, 250-pound statue of a roughed-up chicken leaning on crutches on a public sidewalk in front of a McDonald’s in downtown Denver.
They want hungry folks to know that life ain’t easy for chickens before they become McNuggets. I don’t doubt it.
If PETA activists wanted to parade up and down the 16th Street Mall carrying the funky chicken and shouting “meat is murder!” until they’re Shamrock Shake green in the face, I’d have no problem with that. That’s free speech.
But allowing a giant statue in front of a business for months with the sole purpose of targeting that business is economic suicide, not free speech.
If the city of Denver grants PETA a permit to partially block that public sidewalk (the application is under review), it won’t be long before the chicken has friends on the mall and elsewhere. Perhaps a statue of a slaughtered cow in front of Willie G’s steakhouse? Or maybe a bronze of a sweatshop worker in front of Niketown?
If only PETA had an office on the mall, I’d seek a permit to permanently install my barbecue grill there so I could grill steak for my lunch.
Businesses on the mall aren’t even allowed to erect sandwich boards on the sidewalk advertising their own specials, yet the city was close (and perhaps still is) to granting this request.
Of course, stranger things have happened — and you don’t have to go far to find them. In Aurora, a city councilwoman is leading a boycott of an entire strip mall filled with small (and likely struggling) local businesses. Councilwoman Molly Markert is offended by the young girls in bikinis who walk down Iliff Avenue luring customers into the cheekily named Perky Cups coffee shop. The baristas inside also wear bikinis.
Markert sent a petition, signed by 30 others, to the shopping center’s property manager last month saying Perky Cups’ near-nekkid employees also could be at higher risk of being raped and murdered.
They’re certainly at risk of some ogling, and maybe a sunburn, but murder?
“When one of (the) employees is raped and murdered we will all mourn the loss. In the meantime, we pledged together to not shop or frequent any of the shops in that (shopping center) until the outside parades cease permanently,” she wrote in the letter that also was sent to The Aurora Sentinel.
Hiring girls in bikinis (or tight outfits) is a cheap ploy to lure customers (or at least a certain type of customer) inside a business, but it’s also a fairly successful model. (See Hooters, the new Tilted Kilt on the 16th Street Mall — across from the chicken — and another new bikini coffee shop on Colfax.)
Bikinis in public aren’t illegal. In fact, beaches and pools are full of women wearing them.
Of course, women parading down city streets in them may be distasteful to some and below Aurora’s community standards, but is the proper response to target the entire shopping center?
I dropped by the strip mall last week, and there are enough empty storefronts there to make most local politicians wince. Why would a government leader try to create more?
Politicians like to boast of creating jobs. But what far too many of them don’t get is that the private sector, not government, creates private-sector jobs, and it does it best when government gets out of the way.
Sure, there is a place for government when it comes to regulating businesses, but when it comes to tasty burgers and bikinis, I say butt out.
Dan Haley can be reached at dhaley@denverpost.com. Follow him on Twitter at @danhaleyDP.
