How Your Local Waffle House Can Help Predict the Impact of COVID-19

“If you get there and the Waffle House is closed? That’s really bad.” — Craig Fugate, Federal Emergency Management Agency

When a disaster strikes, governments and aid agencies have a difficult task ahead: to determine where help is needed most, and how much. Floods, storms, and extreme weather can leave some communities devastated, while others nearby can remain relatively untouched. Figuring out which communities are at the greatest risk, and which are able to reopen their economies quickly, can easily become a life or death scenario.

Enter the Waffle House Index.

It comes in three colors, like a stop-light: green, yellow, and red. If the index is green, everything’s great. Yellow? There’s a bit of a problem. Red? Something has gone very, very wrong.

The index works on a simple principle: Waffle House is “always open,” and if it isn’t, then its community has been pushed to an extreme. As a chain that operates in the southern part of the United States, many Waffle House locations are in hurricane and flood-prone areas — because of this, Waffle House has extensive emergency preparedness procedures for natural disasters. They know the risks to their supply chains, and they know them well. Waffle House has limited menus that allow them to operate under all manner of conditions, even without power, gas, or with limited food supplies. If those measures are being used, or if the local Waffle House is forced to close, then it can be representative of the status of the community at large.

The term “Waffle House Index” was originally coined by FEMA director Craig Fugate, who noted the close relationship between a community’s status and its businesses. “If a Waffle House store is open,” said Fugate, “and offering a full menu, the index is green. If it is open but serving from a limited menu, it’s yellow. When the location has been forced to close, the index is red. Because Waffle House is well-prepared for disasters… it’s rare for the index to hit red.”

A yellow index can even be an indicator of which resources have been impacted. Depending on the menu items being offered, it’s possible to determine if the area is without power (compromising freezers) or has a failing supply chain.

Because a Waffle House is often one of the first businesses to re-open after a disaster, even this can help agencies like FEMA see the longer-term impacts to an area. During Hurricane Irene, in 2011, Waffle House re-opened 21 of its 22 locations in Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, and North Carolina only days after the storm caused them to lose power.

“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. The sooner restaurants, grocery and corner stores, or banks can re-open, the sooner local economies will start generating revenue again — signaling a stronger recovery for that community. The success of the private sector in preparing for and weathering disasters is essential to a community’s ability to recover in the long run.” — Dan Stoneking, FEMA

Waffle House itself has embraced the index. In a recent Facebook post on March 24th, they posted the hashtag #WaffleHouseIndexRed and announced the closure of 365 locations across the US in the wake of Coronavirus. But even with the country on lockdown, 1,627 Waffle House locations remained open. For those familiar with the index, this signalled a worrying outlook on the future.

“I don’t think there’s a higher danger level than Waffle House closure y’all,” said one tweet, while a reply said “I swear I’ve eaten at a Waffle House where a tree came in the front window and good chunks of roof came off in bad weather and they just kept right on serving like it was a Tuesday.”

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the Waffle House Index had never been used to track the impacts of a disaster that was not weather-related. But when Waffle House announced its closures in March, many took it as a sign that the pandemic was going to be a lot worse than they originally thought — or that things could always be worse, if so many locations remained open.

“It’s not that bad yet!” said a tweet. “They still have over 1600 open.”

Later, Waffle House announced the closure of some 700 locations due to lack of restaurant traffic. With so many people staying home due to shelter-in-place orders, there simply weren’t enough customers to stay open, and sales plummeted by 70%. This loss of sales caused around 28,000 hourly Waffle House employees to lose their jobs, severely reducing the chain’s workforce from 40,000 to 12,000. As the index has shown with previous natural disasters, the situation of Waffle House is reflective of the nation at large. Thousands of business-owners face difficult decisions about how and when to re-open, and many are struggling to keep their employees on the payroll. Now, as some Waffle House locations in Georgia prepare to open for dine-in customers, the chain’s future remains uncertain. If the nation’s re-opening causes a spike in Coronavirus cases (as many experts say it will), then this might keep the Waffle House Index in the red for far longer.

But when the index goes from red to yellow, and then finally to green, we may be able to breathe a sigh of relief. Once Waffle House announces all operations normal, it might be a sign that the nation is healing from its largest disaster yet.