Here's Why There's A Plane Propeller In Every TGI Friday's

Maybe you didn't pay especially close attention to the decor at your local TGI Fridays the last time you went. (If you've never been, the chain has been struggling with closures and bankruptcy lately, so perhaps time is of the essence.) Dinner at Fridays has a way of folding over itself in your memory, becoming a haze of potato skins, bottomless drinks, and whatever flair decorates the lapels of your overenthusiastic server. But if you looked carefully, you might have noticed a curious prop over the bar at your local Fridays: a plane propeller. Almost every TGI Fridays location has one, and it's apparently intended to symbolize the bar as the restaurant's engine.

TGI Fridays may be best known these days as a restaurant, with its potato skins (which it claims to have invented) and its mozzarella sticks that may or may not have that much mozzarella in them. But when it first opened in 1965, it was the hippest singles bar in all of New York. As it grew in popularity and expanded, TGI Fridays began to give rigorous training to its bartenders, eventually resulting in the kind of flashy flair bartending that Tom Cruise so memorably depicted in "Cocktail." (In fact, Cruise was trained by a bartender from TGI Fridays.) This is all to say that, yes, the bar really is the engine of TGI Fridays.

Generally speaking, these decorations are pretty old-fashioned —  after all, you're not going to see any whimsically spinning wooden propellers on the nose of your transatlantic flight anytime soon. But they're certainly nice to look at, and they do carry some symbolic import, as well as another fun custom: At TGI Fridays, it's tradition for any key visitors at a given restaurant's opening to fix a one dollar bill to one of the propeller blades as a token of good luck.

The propeller isn't the only symbol TGI Fridays has to offer. Each location also has a canoe that's intended to remind employees of the importance of teamwork (although this does get a little awkward if a location closes and they have to figure out what to do with a considerably sized canoe). There's also a peacock in each location, which can take the form of either a mosaic or stained glass. It may be slightly unnerving to eat a plate of chicken wings under the watchful eye of a bird, but we imagine this is something Fridays regulars, with their unique loyalty program, get used to over time.