Need to vent election stress? There's a place for that
The election has stoked Americans’ anger, and that’s been good for Donna Alexander’s business.
Alexander’s Dallas-based Anger Room Corp. was built on the idea that people would pay for the chance to wield a sledgehammer without consequence: Her customers enjoy the unusual experience of smashing as much stuff as they can without getting in trouble. Such stress relief, she said, is in especially high demand because of the election.
“They can destroy mannequins dressed up as Trump or Clinton,” Alexander said of her election promotion. “Even though it’s a Republican state, it has been even between Donald Trump and Hillary. If we go on the damages, we went through three Donald Trump mannequins in less than a month, and only one Hillary Clinton mannequin.”
Stress may be a ubiquitous part of modern American life, but Alexander said she has noticed an uptick since she started her business eight years ago in her townhouse’s garage.
“This one has to be the most heaviest year for people expressing their anger about everything that’s going on in the world,” she said. “Ideally I would love to see it subside, but it’s never going to stop completely. It’s an emotion that we’re born with. I would hope that we could help slow it down and trying to get it back to the neutral level where it’s not as extreme as it is now.”
The original idea came to her when she was a teenager in Chicago in the 1990s and noticed that some people were jailed for damaging property, such as punching holes in the wall. That led her to think about creating a space where people could vent their anger by smashing things -- but without the consequence of tangling with the law.
In 2008, she put her plan into action by creating an “anger room” in the garage of her townhouse. She charged her friends $5 to come over to break things, and word of mouth grew.
“I started getting strangers at my door asking me if this was the place to break stuff,” she said. “I just knew I had something.”
Customers are middle-class and upper-income Americans, people with 9-5 jobs and stay-at-home parents, she said. Clients tend to book the anger room for life issues, such as letting off steam because of problems with relatives, relationships or work.
“We don’t attract people who are mentally unstable,” she noted. “They’re people you see each and every day.”
First-time customers are often surprised at how physically exhausting it is to swing a weapon into old TVs, couches and other items, she said, describing the experience as a workout. “After they get over the exhaustion, they say they feel totally relieved,” Alexander added.
Prices start at $25 and go up to $500 for custom-built rooms, which can be created to replicate an office, kitchen or living room, for example. Items are donated by local residents or obtained on bulk trash pickup days. The weapon selection changes each week, ranging from baseball bats to golf clubs.
Since Alexander started her business, other anger rooms have popped up in other states and countries, such as The Smash Shack in North Carolina and the Rage Room in Toronto.
The gender split in Alexander’s client base leans toward women, which she estimates at anywhere from 55 percent to 70 percent of her customers. Women “go through through a lot more stress than guys do,” she said. “We have so much on our plates.”
