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Today, we're getting a table at Dick's Last Resort
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the restaurant where the staff is rude to you. Dick's Last Resort is a casual dining-themed restaurant
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where the staff all act like a bunch of, well, not nice people
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Dick's was founded in 1985 by a guy named Richard Dick Chase
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The idea, as the man himself once put it, was to create a compendium of every beer joint I ever got drunk and threw up in
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And perhaps as a nod to that reflection, Dick's mascot, a leering party animal and a tacky Hawaiian shirt
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who appears on a dizzying array of merchandise, is loosely modeled on Chase himself
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Dick's Last Resort was a huge success. In fact, its owner claims the place made him an atrocious
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amount of money, and it would quickly expand into a chain. What attracted people to Dick's
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Well, diners have plenty of options when it comes to goofy cocktails and carb-heavy American cuisine
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But the primary appeal of Dick's is the restaurant's unique atmosphere, and that atmosphere is, in a word, bizarrely hostile. Dick's schtick is that the servers
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are trained to be rude, if not outright insulting, to their customers. They'll also try to humiliate
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you by doing things like making you wear a large paper chef's hat with an insult scrawled across it
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The serving staff may also try to bully you into wearing a ridiculously large bib and then make fun
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of you for wearing it. And if you're going to ask them for extra napkins or straws, you better be
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sure you want them thrown at your head because the waitstaff is likely to pelt you with them in the spirit of faux hostility There are some pretty firm limits on what the servers at Dick are allowed to joke about For starters the staff is forbidden from referencing things like a customer race religion gender or gender identity in their insults They also
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not allowed to use any vulgar language, which is kind of ironic when you think about it. To make
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sure employees understand the rules and how to work within them, everyone who works at Dick's
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goes through an online training course before they start and then attends weekly meetings to
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hone their skills. The wild success notwithstanding, sometimes things were hard on Dicks
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For example, in 1986, Chase was sued by his investors. Twice. The disgruntled money men
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were Robert and Stephen Schiff. In their first suit, the Schiffs claimed that Chase had
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misappropriated hundreds of thousands of dollars in company money which he spent on items for
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himself. Less than a month later, the same group filed a second suit claiming trade infringement
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In a nutshell, that means that they thought he was stealing ideas that belonged to Dick's last
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resort as a company and transferring them to his other business endeavors. Dick's also got sued by
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the Mall of America in 2021 for abandoning their location at the mall after it closed down during
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the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Even though his likeness still appears on their merchandise
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Dick himself got out of the Dick's business in 2019, selling the entire franchise to Deja Vu
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Services Incorporated, the operator of over 130 strip clubs around the world. The franchise is now
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down to just 12 locations. But there may be a hope for Dick's yet. Dick's itself has recently
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announced plans to open two new locations in Florida, so it may not be the last resort after all
