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Comment by athenot | Hacker News Reader

One of the aspects of Waffle House that's always impressed me is their commitment to be open no matter what happens. This has prompted the informal Waffle House Index: the informal metric used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to determine the effect of a storm and the likely scale of assistance required for disaster recovery.

https://www.fema.gov/blog/2011-07-07/news-day-what-do-waffle...

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Wouldn't this just mean that they are putting their employees lives in danger more than the average restaurant? It's got to be hard to choose between following a suggested evacuation and losing your job.

From what I understand they comply with evacuation orders, but have a hefty focus on the logistical support necessary to take an entire location from running to stripped-down and boarded-up to running again as fast as possible.

Supposedly, this is also why FEMA likes the "Waffle House Index" so much in the states where it works, because Waffle House supposedly doesn't pressure employees in emergencies to show up to work and the "menu level" (red/yellow) does also reflect the number of employees that showed up to work that shift in their checklist of which menu to use (rather than the other way around of the menu determining how many employees to call into work), so the "Waffle House Index" also will show some indirect evidence of neighborhood state based on employee ability/interest to get to work (including some indirect overall socioeconomic indicators of a neighborhood's general willingness to evacuate).

Not really no - employees are not fired if an evacuation is forced or if they can't get there because of a disaster.

As a Floridian, I have to say it sucks sitting in the humidity for a week with no power so I’m sure most of their workers are happy go in and help get people a meal.

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