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Comment by iambateman | Hacker News Reader

There's a world where Waffle House acquires this from him for like $50k and it's an endearing story of corporate humanity.

But if I'm running the WH brand, I simply don't want to be the semi-official corporate sponsor of every major natural disaster.

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I think you hit the nail on the head, waffle house index has too many negative connotations.

Probably true, even though the point of it is a testament to how robust and reliable WH's are, they don't close if they have any way at all to stay open, is the original point of it. It's quite positive toward WH.

Does the company take care of it's employees? Are employees expected to travel to/from the workplace during horrible weather? If the conditions worsen is the company responsible for the employee's safety? What about customers?

They send specific jump teams in there. More details:

https://www.govtech.com/em/disaster/hurricane-preparation-an...

Waffle House is like weirdly serious about disaster preparedness, for a restaurant chain.

They probably already make a ton of money selling this information to hedge funds.

It's a post facto index. It lags disaster by a few days and is far more interesting as a recovery statistic than a forecast. That's why it was important to certain types of FEMA operations, going in days or weeks later and trying to assess the hardest hit areas and triage them into a priority list. If Waffle House is serving a limited breakfast menu 24-hours a day in a neighborhood you can focus on sending the Red Cross-sponsored food tents to a different neighborhood.

Waffle House has been trying to distance themselves from it as a "Disaster Index" ever since the FEMA Director admitted to using it as an unofficial index. It's part of why FEMA increasingly refers to it as "unofficial" and has started to distance itself from discussions about it, too. I agree with the OP that part of it is definitely Waffle House wants to distance themselves from being "the brand of disasters". When it has been talked about as a "Recovery Index" (and without mentioning FEMA, because FEMA is the "brand of disasters") and the light has been shined to focus on why they've been among the fastest businesses in the country to recover from the worst problems, they've been happy to discuss and market that. It really is cool to see their flowcharts and checklists and graded levels of menus designed for all the scenarios they thought to design disaster recovery for (does the building have electric? does it have gas? when was the last supply truck in? when is the next supply truck expected? what are the road conditions?; it truly is fascinating).

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