Short Stuff: Waffle House Index

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0:39Hey, 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 here at Stuff You Should Know. That's right. 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. Maybe still, but maybe not after this. I feel like we've taken a pretty good chunk out of what would have been a Waffle House episode. Agreed. Well, because we're talking about the Waffle House Index. And yes, there's plenty of interesting stuff about the Waffle House.

1:11But 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 for staying open against all odds. That's right. 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. 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 and as you'll see with the Waffle House index, if a Waffle House is closed, that is that is very bad news for the area that that place is in because they stay open at all costs.

1:58Yeah. 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 ideology that Waffle House should serve as essentially a community center during disasters. And during normal times, they're just waffle houses. But during a natural disaster in particular, 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. We're going to talk about a few of them here and there.

2:43One 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, 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. 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. So if you, you know, if the power's out, you can still probably go to a Waffle House and not only get power, but, you know, get a hot meal.

3:23Yeah. Whether you're like somebody whose house just got ravaged or a first responder helping people whose house just got ravaged. Yeah. Or just hungry. It's a really important thing that you just totally overlook. Look, 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. And they have like actual what are called Waffle House jump teams that can show up. Parachuters. They parachute in. They do parachute in. And I hope they have better names for these things than Plan B. I hope it's more like Plan Dark Star or Plan Sorcerer's Sleeve or something like that.

4:04Okay. Better than plan B. But they parachute in, like you said, and they will open a Waffle House faster than you can say Waffle House. Yeah, that's right. Wait, hold on. Faster than you can say scattered, covered, smothered, and chunked. I know I've asked you how you got yours. How do you get yours? Your hash browns? Oh, you do? So chunked is ham, right? 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 sautéed onions. 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.

4:44But I do get a double order because I just – two of those – one isn't enough. Yeah, agreed. But I don't go anymore. I think I mentioned on an episode last time I went, it was actually with Hodgman after he went camping with a group of dudes here on the way out. I was like, we're stopping at Waffle House, right? And he went, oh, yeah, we definitely are. And you don't go anymore? No, I mean, that was the only time I've been in years. I see. I got you. I thought you were saying, like, you don't want to replace that memory with another memory. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. That was just a year and a half ago.

5:17But I just, it's just not, you know, I went a lot in college, like, you know, late night after the bars. But, you know, you grow up a little bit and you realize you can't eat Waffle House every week. That's true. It's a sad realization, everybody. It's coming your way, though, if you're young. Yep. 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.

6:00Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion-dollar company, which would have been unimaginable without AI, and now it will happen.

6:35I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents in small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

7:12So, 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, you know, on that limited menu at least. And this all started after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I think seven of the restaurants were completely destroyed, very sadly. 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. 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.

7:53Yeah, for sure. Not only did they come up with the book, that's when they figured out, OK, what kind of limited menu can we come up with? How can we store it? 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. and we're just basically ready. It's called disaster preparedness. I had no idea about this. I really just thought Waffle House just stayed open just out of sheer will until I researched this. But they have a disaster preparedness plan. 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 blew away and they need to rebuild.

8:41and probably also more like generators and gas cans and so on and so forth. I don't know why I'm staying on this list, but 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. Yeah, for sure, which leads us finally to the Waffle House Index, which is a pretty unique thing. It was the brainchild of a guy named Craig Fugate, who was the FEMA administrator back in the early 2010s. And he had that position after the Joplin tornado of 2011 in May of that year. And he had kind of had this idea for a little while because he had noticed after various hurricanes that Waffle House was one of, if not the only thing, open.

9:33And 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. And he started looking at maps and realized that like, hey, if you actually look at where the weather hit it the hardest and the damage was the most severe, 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. and he really like that was sort of like the 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.

10:11Yeah 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 and if they don't answer the phone there's trouble in that community 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. There's green is the best part of the index. It means that your Waffle House is totally fine. Maybe there's like a cracked window, but everything else is good. And everyone in the community can come there.

10:45Yellow has a limited menu. And they're probably using a generator. And then red is like, it's closed. The Waffle House is toast. Come here because this is the community that's hardest hit. But 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. Yeah, absolutely. You don't get the red index a lot. But, again, if you do, then that's, you know, that's the really bad sign. If, you know, they know a hurricane or something like that is coming and they like there's evacuation orders and stuff like that, you know, if it's mandatory, a Waffle House might close.

11:29But the very first chance they get to open that thing up, they're going to open it back up. Yeah, there's this really great story I read on the Waffle House blog. Weldon, North Carolina, back in 2011, Hurricane Irene passed through there. and the Waffle House, the local Waffle House lost its power, but the gas was still going to the grill. 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. And then when it just became too dark to keep going, they closed and then opened at first light at dawn. Yeah, I love that story, but I was so ready when I was reading it to hear they cooked by candlelight through the night.

12:12Yeah. Sorry. Sorry, Chuck. I didn't say I expected them to. I just, that would have been even more amazing. But maybe also dangerous. So that might have had something to do with it. 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. I looked up, by the way, I tried to find that they have a mobile emergency. What is it? like a... It's like an RV, like a command center. Yeah, but the only thing I could find looked like a food truck. Oh, is that right? Yeah.

12:50I mean, I tried to find a picture and everything, it just kept showing me this food truck. And I couldn't, when it was called the command center, I was like, is it dressed to look like a Waffle House? Because it looks like a little tiny Waffle House. Oh, does it? And is there like communications inside? Or are they showing up and cooking? Like I I couldn't figure that part out. If it is a food truck, though, there's 100 % chance that they're serving empanadas. Right. Even from the Waffle House food truck. But they have a great nickname for it, though, at least. Yeah, it's from Stripes. What would they call it?

13:23The EM50, which is apparently the assault vehicle that Bill Murray drives in Stripes, was the EM50. I never got into that movie. Like, liked it or saw it all the way through? Saw it all the way through. Oh, Stripes is great. I think. It's a movie in two parts, so the first half is a lot better than when they go on the mission in the RV. Gotcha. Okay. But, you know, not the best movie in the world, but I love Harold Ramis. Well, yeah, of course. I feel like it might have just been a couple of years ahead of me when I was younger. I was more a meatballs guy. Yeah, I mean, that stuff, I wasn't allowed to watch any of that at the time, so I had to sneak it a little later.

14:04Yeah, I don't know how I was allowed to watch Meatballs because I was never allowed to watch Porky's or just about anything. My mom wouldn't even let me watch Sanford and Son because she thought Red Fox was a dirty old man. Oh, interesting. That's funny. Yeah. Well, it wasn't funny when you're a kid and you want to watch Sanford and Son. It's not funny at all. I learned two things about your mom this week. That and that she played the banjo, which just floors me how cool that is. She loved playing the banjo. I love that. And I love the Waffle House Index. And Waffle House didn't even sponsor this, everybody.

14:38That's just how impressed we are with the Waffle House Index. I always thought it was just some fooling around pop culture thing. Nope, it's a real thing. Yeah. If you've never been, if you're ever in the South, go check out a Waffle House. The coolest, most awesome, fun people work there. And you might be able to get into a fistfight with Kid Rock. You never know. Yeah. There's a pretty good chance you will. Short Stuff is out.

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