Earlier this week we heard of a Virginia restaurant using mannequins to sit at unoccupied tables so the place doesn't look so empty. Now...A South Carolina restaurant partially reopening for dine-in customers is keeping the tables compliant with social distancing guidelines by filling the dining room with blow-up dolls. The Open Hearth restaurant (in Taylors) closed its dining room due to the COVID-19 pandemic March 17 and was allowed to reopen this week with a reduced capacity and a requirement that customers are seated 6 feet apart. The owners of the eatery said they didn’t want the restaurant to look empty when customers came in to eat.
… One of the owners said, “Instead of using scary, yellow tape or roping off the empty tables, I thought, ‘We’re going to make this restaurant look full.” The owner said she ordered “the G-rated kind” of inflatable dolls from Amazon, dressed them up like customers and seated them at tables that would be off-limits to diners.