Anytime I go down South, my first task when I get off the plane is to proceed directly to the nearest Waffle House. It’s not haute cuisine, it’s not that nutritious, and I can make waffles and eggs in the comfort of my own home anytime. Still, as a child of the Deep South who grew up road tripping with my parents all over the area (we were a bowling family travelling to tournaments), Waffle House was a staple of my childhood, and a lot of the flavors we grow up with are the flavors we still connect to as adults. Nobody does a soft, sweet waffle like they do. Nobody does a fluffy omelet like they do. When I was visiting my dad last month and helping to take care of him after his accident, I spent a lot of time at the Waffle House. The food always tastes the same, you can find one anywhere, and they’re always open.
Except this trip, they weren’t always open.
There’s a Waffle House about 10 miles east of my cousin’s house, where I was staying while I was down there. We went together once for breakfast. The next week I was going to stop by on my way back to her place from the hospital, but they were closed. When I pulled into the parking lot and opened my door to get out, a guy in the car at the end of the row opened his door and said, “We closed! We ain’t got no cook right now!”
I’ve never seen a closed Waffle House. I made a sandwich for dinner instead.
A few days later, I was on my way to visit another cousin further north, and Google Maps said there was a Waffle House on the way right off the interstate. When I got there, the restaurant was dark and all the chairs were on the tables. There was nobody inside and nobody in the parking lot. They looked very closed, so I went to Bojangle’s next door and got a breakfast biscuit..
The Friday before my flight back, I decided to go to Waffle House again. There’s one 7 miles west of my cousin’s house near the rehab facility, so I was going to stop by on the way to visit my dad. When I got there it was open, but half of the restaurant was roped off with all of the chairs up on the tables. The girl who took my order said they didn’t have enough people right now to open the whole restaurant.
That was three Waffle House locations in the span of a month that were having trouble staying open. When I got back to NYC, I made jokes about the country being royally screwed because if Waffle House is closed, we’re in real trouble, but I was only half-kidding. Waffle House is an actual barometer for the health of an area, but it’s usually mentioned in reference to a natural disaster or a hurricane.
If you get there and the Waffle House is closed? That’s really bad…
— Craig Fugate, Former Head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
(cont. WSJ)
FEMA never formally adopted the Waffle House Index as an official measure of a disaster’s impact on an area, but along with other chain stores with a high level of disaster preparedness (like Wal-Mart and Home Depot), you can gauge the severity of the damage based on how these types of businesses are faring during and immediately after a crisis. For Waffle House, there’s a stoplight scale.
(cont. Fox News)
Because the South is an area prone to weather disasters (hurricanes, floods, tornadoes), Waffle House employees undergo disaster preparedness training. There’s also a hierarchy of employees based on who needs to be in the restaurant to keep it open and who cannot work based on location or family commitments, and emergency staff is on call during disasters. In addition, the Waffle House supply chain depends on local warehouses stocked with at least a week of non-perishables in the event of major transportation disruptions. (x) You may not get scrambled eggs, but you can get hash browns right after a hurricane. Because all of those variables are taken into account when a location announces itself as red, yellow, or green, it’s an on-the-ground barometer for the local population’s recovery.
“The Waffle House test doesn’t just tell us how quickly a business might rebound — it also tells us how the larger community is faring,” Dan Stoneking wrote on the FEMA Blog in 2011. “The sooner restaurants, grocery and corner stores, or banks can reopen, the sooner local economies will start generating revenue again — signaling a stronger recovery for that community.”
(cont. WaPo)
So what does it say about the state of the country that Waffle House is no longer reliably open? They’re the first to rebound after a severe tornado or a Cat 4 hurricane. They stay open during floods and freak ice storms in the South, but I had three highly uncharacteristic encounters in less than a month. For the entirety of my childhood driving back and forth across the Deep South with my parents, we never pulled into the parking lot of a Waffle House and found that it was closed. We’ve been to locations right by the interstate next to podunk nowhere towns and locations deep into the metro areas of big cities like Atlanta and Birmingham. We’ve been at 5am, so my dad could “Get us out on the road before too much traffic,” and at midnight, walking next door for a late dinner after checking in at a roadside motel. They were never closed.
The economy isn’t doing well and neither are everyday folks. We’ve just lived through a pandemic where we watched the richest Americans increase their wealth to evermore unfathomable heights while the rest of us watched our savings wiped out by employment instability. Billionaires are going to upper sky for ten minutes at a time while we can’t pay our rent. This is coming on the heels of being forced to sit still for the better part of a year, which was a first for many segments of the population. People who work multiple low-wage jobs to make ends meet have never had the opportunity to sit still. They got to breathe, take up a hobby, focus on themselves, and actually see the disparity in the country. They don’t want to go back to the grind of being exhausted and mentally drained while seeing news reports of the rich burning money for fun.
The Waffle House can’t recover from the disaster of COVID not because of an interrupted supply chain or damage to its locations. The Waffle House can’t recover from COVID because we the people are broken. The Waffle House Index is struggling to keep its locations at Green because the United States itself is still on Red and can’t recover without a full-scale redistribution of wealth and a complete upheaval in how we think about labor, wealth, and worth in society.
If you get there and Waffle House is closed, that’s really bad. It’s really bad here.
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