A Chinese Restaurant Has Been Offering Discounts Based On Bra Size

A restaurant called Trendy Shrimp in Zhejiang province in China has come under fire recently, for a sexist and body-shaming promotion. According to the BBC, the restaurant has been offering discounts based on bra sizes.

If someone who wears an A cup were to eat at Trendy Shrimp, for example, they would get a 5% discount. But if someone who wears a G cup ate there, they would get 65% off.

Customers complained about advertisements from the restaurant, with included photos of women with increasingly large breast sizes and a slogan that said, "The whole city is looking for BREASTS."

Trendy Shrimp general manager Lan Shenggang defended the advertisements to BBC, saying, "Once the promotion started, customer numbers rose by about 20%. Some of the girls we met were very proud — they had nothing to hide."

Whether or not some women were happy to take advantage of the discount, however, doesn't mean that it's not sexist. Offering greater deals to women with larger breasts relies on tropes that serve to objectify women's bodies and to shame bodies that have naturally small breasts.

According to a local newspaper, the Qianjiang Evening Post, restaurant workers didn't do anything to measure a woman's breast or have her prove her cup size. It was all visual. It's very likely that some, if not most, of the shop workers are men, so even though Trendy Shrimp wasn't requiring women to prove that they really do wear the bra size they claim, it did set up an environment in which it was a man's job to ogle a woman's breast. That's pretty messed up.

Luckily, enough people complained about the advertisement that the restaurant has canceled the discount policy, Huffington Post reports, even though Lan still holds strong that it was nothing more than a genius marketing strategy.