Who among us hasn’t wanted to take a 5-iron to a computer printer?
Now there’s a place to do it without having the neighbours wonder if you’ve slipped a cog.
Terry LeBlanc, general manager of Halifax’s newly opened Rage Room, located in the north end, was doing some online research into different business ideas when he stumbled on videos about rage rooms, and ended up watching them all night.
The idea of the rooms is that they give you a socially acceptable way to work out your frustrations. By smashing things.
“The original concept apparently started inCroatia,” LeBlanc said. “Actually, there was anepisode of the Amazing Race where they were smashing stuff in a smash room, and I think they were in Croatia. It started there, then it got popular in Asia.
“You might have had a bad day, or maybe you just like to break stuff. We tell people this is entertainment. If you’ve had a bad day, fine, but if you have real rage issues, maybe this isn’t the place to come.”
There are about a half-dozen of the smash rooms in Canada.
LeBlanc’s, the only one east of Montreal, isn’t a franchise, but the name Rage Room is trademarked by a company in Toronto and he bought into their licensee program in order to use their name and logos.
After dressing in coveralls, a mask like a paintball mask, gloves and a chest protector, customerstake a box and peruse walls of neatly filled shelves of stereo equipment, toasters, coffee makers, piggy banks, ceramic cookie jars, china sets, punch bowls, wine glasses and the like.
“I’ve aligned myself with some non-profits and a couple of them own thrift stores and most of my stuff comes from them,” said LeBlanc. “Ninety per cent of the printers and everything else that’s here, if not more, was all destined for the trash or the recycler.”
You can also bring your own stuff to obliterate in one of LeBlanc’s two rooms. “People smash figurines, glasses, plates, all your household stuff, even appliances,” he said. “I just recently got a water cooler, a Christmas tree, a fan. You’d be surprised at what people bring in here.”
All the stuff that gets smashed ends up in the same place it would have anyway, either the garbage or the recycler, albeit in
much smaller pieces. Computer printers are most popular, or most hated, depending how you look at it.
“The electronics, we clean those up, put them in boxes and take them to the depot. They accept them smashed.”
LeBlanc is also looking at acquiring equipmentthat will turn smashed glass into sand, for whichhe hopes to find a market. He’s been told to expect that 60 per cent of his
clients will be women, and most of his bookings have been made by women so far, but he hasn’t been open long enough to determine any firm trends.
There are varous packages. One of the more basic is Smash-It 101, where the customer gets to crunch 20 items at a cost of $30 per person. The package called Bring Your Own Box is the least costly; for $20 per person the customer can bring in one box of their own stuff to smash — $10 for each additional box.
“So far the Super Smash has been most popular,” he said. “It’s a $100 package and you get 40 breakables and two electronics, and there’s add-ons if you smash everything quick and want to smash some more.”
He is open seven days a week, in the afternoon and evening. At other Rage Room locations in Canada, the week of Valentine’s Day is the busiest time of the year.
“You have couples, but you also get disgruntled exes, gifts from failed marriages, you name it,” LeBlanc said. “They call it anti-V day.”
