Back when I was a young man and not the old shitty achy back having asshole that I am now, I used to work for Outback Steakhouse. I put in 8 years there in various locations in New Jersey, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. I still keep in touch with many of my friends from there...especially the Valencia, California one.
It’s been about 15 years since I worked for the company and I’ve noticed tons of changes as I’ve dined there throughout the years. One specifically is that the employees no longer wear their pins. You laugh...Outback pins were all the rage for years! Some fetched a ton of money on the secondary market as they were super tough to obtain. They were distributed in different ways. Certain restaurants had their own, there were sales goals, ones you got for working charity events. All sorts of things.
I’ll do a separate detailed write up in the future about the pins. Today I’m focusing on just one. The Valencia, California pin. Why? Because we made it! Our location didn’t have one so 2 of my buddies, Dustin and Steve and myself paid for and designed it. We all put our input into it to some degree and we had one of the patrons named Marty who used to come into the bar all the time, sketch it out for us as he was a very talented artist. We have one to everyone who worked there and a handful to the restaurant itself so they can do with them as they saw fit in the future. The 3 of us split the rest. We used slot for trading and even sold a bunch.
We had to drive to The Pin Center in Las Vegas to get it all situated. They were the company that did all of Outbacks Pins at the time. I think we mad 500 of them if I recall correctly. I still have a small quantity I kept for whatever dumb reason. I found them recently in our move and it brought back some fun memories. I ended up selling most of my pins about a year after I left the company and got around $1600 for the lot. Pretty nutty...right?
Thx for taking a trip down memory lane with me!
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