Short Stuff: Waffle House Index

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Speaker 4 Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too, sitting in for Dave, and we're just cooking it up.

Speaker 4 Here's Steph You Should Know.

Speaker 5 That's right.

Speaker 5 We've talked about Waffle House here and there quite a bit over the years, and I was going to do a full Waffle House episode. That was in the pipeline.

Speaker 5 Maybe still, but maybe not after this.

Speaker 4 I feel like we've taken a pretty good chunk out of what would have been a Waffle House episode. Agreed.

Speaker 4 Because we're talking about the Waffle House Index, and there's plenty of interesting stuff about the Waffle House, but I would argue that the Waffle House Index is possibly the most interesting thing about the chain of what everyone in the South or Southeast knows is 24-7 restaurants that are legendary legendary for staying open against all odds.

Speaker 5 That's right. And a lot of restaurants and chains may claim to be open 365 days a year.
And they, you know, a lot of them are in general.

Speaker 5 But the Waffle House in particular prides itself and has taken great, great, great efforts to really stay open. Like it's got to be a.

Speaker 5 And as you'll see with the Waffle House Index, if a Waffle House is closed,

Speaker 5 that is very bad news for the area that that place is in because they stay open at all costs.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And they don't just stay open at all costs because they couldn't care less about their staff and they're just greedy and want to make money.
This is actually like by design. There's a corporate

Speaker 4 ideology.

Speaker 4 Mandate works, sure.

Speaker 4 That Waffle House should serve as essentially a

Speaker 4 community center during disasters. And during normal times, they're just waffle houses.

Speaker 5 But during during a natural disaster in particular uh you you should just stand back and watch them go because they have actual plans that the company has developed to figure out how to stay open to serve the community yeah for sure uh we're going to talk about a few of them uh here and there one one of them is they have a limited menu and it's not like oh what do we have on hand it's like all right we're going to um you know i don't know what they call it on the inside but let's just say like we're going to to plan B or something, and that means we're switching to the official limited menu when there are food shortages, when the power's out and stuff like that.

Speaker 5 Most, I don't think all of them do at this point, but most of them, and I'm sure they want to have them all on backup generators, that's been a thing for a while.

Speaker 5 So if you, you know, if the power's out, you can still probably go to a waffle house.

Speaker 5 and not only get power, but, you know, get a hot meal. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Whether you're like somebody whose house just got ravaged or a first responder helping people whose house just got ravaged. Yeah.
Yeah. Or just hungry.

Speaker 4 It's a really important thing that you just totally overlook.

Speaker 4 Like if your kitchen is gone and all of the other restaurants in town are shut down, having a waffle house open is a really, really big deal.

Speaker 4 And they have like actual, what are called waffle house jump teams that can show up.

Speaker 4 Parachuters. They parachute in.
They do parachute in.

Speaker 4 And I hope they have better better names for these things than Plan B. I hope it's more like Plan Darkstar or Plan Sorcerer Sleeve or something like that.
Okay. Better than Plan B.

Speaker 4 But they parachute in, like you said,

Speaker 4 and they will open a waffle house faster than you can say waffle house. Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 4 Wait, hold on.

Speaker 4 Faster than you can say scattered, covered, smothered, and chunked.

Speaker 5 I know I've asked you how you got yours. How do you get yours?

Speaker 4 hash browns?

Speaker 5 Oh, you do? So chunked is ham, right?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I don't eat ham anymore, but I haven't been to a Waffle House since I stopped eating ham. So, yes, I always got it with ham, cheese, and sauteed onions.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I think I told, I mean, I just get mine straight up. I'm the weirdo that gets unadorned hash browns at Waffle House.

Speaker 5 But I do get a double order because I just, two of those, one isn't enough.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I agreed.

Speaker 5 But I don't go anymore.

Speaker 5 I think I mentioned on an episode last time I went, it was actually with Hodgman after he went camping with a group, a group of dudes here on the way out.

Speaker 5 I was like, we're stopping at Waffle House, right?

Speaker 4 He went, oh, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 4 We definitely are. And you don't go anymore?

Speaker 5 No, I mean, that was the only time I've been in years.

Speaker 4 I see. I got you.
I thought you were saying, you don't want to replace that memory with another. Oh, no, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 5 That was just a year and a half ago. But I just, it's just not, you know, I went a lot in college, like, you know, late night after the bars.

Speaker 5 But, you know, you grow up a little bit and you realize you can't eat Waffle House every week.

Speaker 4 That's true.

Speaker 5 It's a sad realization, everybody. It's coming your way, though, if you're young.
Yep.

Speaker 4 So I say we take a break and come back and talk more about this Waffle House Index and what it is and where it came from. All right, let's do it.

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Speaker 5 So, you know, we talked about Waffle House being set up with generators and jump teams and limited menus. They also have temporary warehouses where they can store stuff,

Speaker 5 you know, on that limited menu at least. And

Speaker 5 this all started after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I think seven of the restaurants were completely destroyed, very sadly.

Speaker 5 A hundred of them shut down, but they got up and running again very, very fast. And the company basically decided like, hey, this is such a valuable thing.

Speaker 5 We need to come up with that official plan, like a literal book of how to open as quickly as possible during an emergency or stay open during an emergency.

Speaker 4 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 4 Not only did they come up with the book, that's when they figured out, okay, what kind of limited menu can we come up with? How can we store it?

Speaker 4 They identified like local temporary food storage they could use that was, you know, I'm sure central to a number of waffle houses, not one for each one.

Speaker 4 And we're just basically ready. It's called disaster preparedness.
I had no idea about this. I really just thought Waffle House just

Speaker 4 stayed open just out of sheer will until I researched this.

Speaker 4 But they have a disaster preparedness

Speaker 4 plan.

Speaker 4 And apparently other companies do in the United States too, like Lowe's and Home Depot will, because people need lumber and shovels and hammers and stuff because they're blew away and they need to rebuild.

Speaker 4 And probably also more like generators and

Speaker 4 gas cans and so on and so forth.

Speaker 4 I don't know why I'm staying on this list, but um Waffle House isn't the only one, but they're just part of a handful of companies who've essentially made themselves like de facto essential operations for post-disaster preparedness stuff.

Speaker 5 Yeah, for sure. Uh which leads us finally to the Waffle House Index, uh, which is a pretty unique thing.

Speaker 5 It was the brainchild of a guy named Craig Fugate, uh, who was the FEMA administrator uh back in the early 2010s, and he had that position after the Joplin tornado of 2011 in May of that year.

Speaker 5 And he had kind of had this idea for a little while because he had noticed after, you know, various hurricanes that Waffle House was one of, if not the only thing, open.

Speaker 5 And he started to notice this sort of trend like, hey, your community doesn't have water, you don't have power, yet the Waffle House was open.

Speaker 5 And he started looking at maps and realized that like, hey, if you actually look at where

Speaker 5 the weather hit it the hardest and the damage was the most severe,

Speaker 5 you can kind of rate that according to whether or not that waffle house is either open, closed, or serving a full menu, limited menu, and just how they're doing.

Speaker 5 And he really like, that was sort of like the light bulb above the head moment when he said, this could be a real thing. The Waffle House Index could really help us out.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And I mean, it's as simple as like calling the local waffle house in Tampa after a hurricane just passed through and saying, are you guys still open?

Speaker 4 And if they don't answer the phone, there's trouble in that community.

Speaker 4 And he was saying, like, that's where FEMA should start sending its people first because that's as bad as it gets if the waffle house isn't open. And they actually color-coded it.

Speaker 4 There's green is the best part of the index. It means that your waffle house is totally fine.

Speaker 4 Maybe there's like a cracked window, but everything else is good and everyone in the community can come there. Yellow has a limited menu and they're probably using a generator.

Speaker 4 And then red is like it's closed. The Waffle House is toast

Speaker 4 come here because this is the community that's hardest hit. That's how like dedicated Waffle House is to staying open.
That if they're closed, FEMA knows that that's where you should go first.

Speaker 5 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 5 You don't get the red index a lot.

Speaker 5 But again, if you do, then that's, you know, that's the really bad sign.

Speaker 5 If they know a hurricane or something like that is coming

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 there's evacuation orders and stuff like that,

Speaker 5 it's mandatory, a waffle house might close, but the very first chance they get to open that thing up, they're going to open it back up.

Speaker 4 Yeah, there's this really great story I read on the Waffle House blog.

Speaker 4 In Weldon, North Carolina, back in 2011, Hurricane Irene passed through there and the waffle house, house, the local waffle house lost its power, but the gas was still going to the grill.

Speaker 4 And so the waffle house stayed open and was cooking for people as long as it was light enough for them to see what they were doing.

Speaker 4 And then when it just became too dark to keep going, they closed and then opened at first light at dawn.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I love that story, but I was so ready when I was reading it to hear they cooked by candlelight through the night.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Sorry, sorry, Chuck.

Speaker 5 I didn't say I expected them to. I just thought thought that would have been even more amazing.
But maybe also dangerous, so that might have had something to do with it.

Speaker 4 Or maybe they just didn't have candles. And then the Waffle House employee, or the manual afterward was like, buy candles, make sure you have plenty of candles.
We learned from Hurricane Irene.

Speaker 5 I looked up, by the way, I tried to find that they have a

Speaker 5 mobile emergency. What is it? Like a...

Speaker 4 It's like a RV, like a command center.

Speaker 5 Yeah, but the only thing I could find looked like a food truck.

Speaker 4 Oh, is that right?

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, I tried to find a picture, and everything, it just kept showing me this food truck.