Anger rooms are all the rage in America

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

There’s an old axiom about not getting mad, but getting even – the danger is that can have disastrous consequences in the land of the free and the home of the firearm.

So anything that keeps angry Americans from opening fire on each other has to be a good thing – which is why the Rage Room is a welcome addition to the landscape on the other side of the pond.

Shawn Baker is a Texan woman who runs Tantrums LLC in Houston.

This is a place where stressed people – armed with a baseball bat, a sledgehammer or a lead pipe – pay $3 a minute to go on the rampage in a room full of old TV sets, glass bottles, crockery and anything else that will break.

And it’s a phenomenon that is both simple and spreading – a place to take your anger out on old rubbish so that you get it all out of your system without anyone actually getting hurt.

It’s not an original idea of course – down the road in Dallas, the Anger Room has been doing the business for over eight years.

The owners described this as a place where you can let your hair down, gear up and destroy real-life mocked rooms that simulate an actual workplace, living area or kitchen.

It comes complete with dummies, mannequins, TVs, tables and many, many more breakable items.

Reassuringly, Anger Room ‘does not claim to be a mental help or medical facility’ and they ‘do not treat, give diagnosis or provide medical therapy of any kind’.

It’s just a bit of craic.

And there is the Smash Shack in North Carolina, which expected to cater to military service members from nearby military base, only for the surprised owners to see more than 70% of its customers were angry women.

There are variations on this Rage Room concept in Serbia, Moscow, Canada, Italy, Australia and it’s spreading – but the Americans, and it’s no surprise given how worked up they can get, are to the forefront of this phenomenon.

A recent CNN/ORC poll released found that 71 per cent of them are ‘very’ or ‘somewhat angry’ about ‘the way things are going in the country today’ – and this is before Trump takes over the Oval Office.

Now there’s even talk of getting these as pop-up bashing shops on the side of American highways where angry motorists can take out their road rage without actually inflicting damage on another driver.

The Japanese had a version of this in the workplace where you could go into a padded room and knock nine bells out of a mannequin that had the face of your boss superimposed onto it.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.