A Moveable Feast: Fast Food and the Pandemic

There’s a rule of thumb among disaster response teams that a crisis isn’t really a crisis until the Waffle House closes. The Atlanta-based chain hardly shuts down for anything: not hurricanes, not tornados, not floods. Waffle Houses are so reliably open that, during natural disasters, FEMA uses their status as an indicator of whether or not the surrounding neighborhoods have truly been ravaged. When the coronavirus pandemic forced more than four hundred Waffle Houses to close in late March, people justifiably freaked out. This was a “red alert” according to FEMA’s tracker, something that usually only happens if a hurricane makes a direct landfall on a Waffle House. But, as March dragged into April and April into May, it became increasingly clear that this wasn’t the hurricane we feared. It was bad — and briefly horrifying in New York and New Jersey — but not so bad that every Waffle House in the country needed to close. It’s no surprise that the chain led the charge when, in early May, Georgia became one of the first states to reopen its economy. It shouldn’t be a surprise either that, only days after Georgia reopened, Waffle House CEO Walt Ehmer found himself sitting across from Donald Trump, advising the president on how to reopen other restaurants safely. After all, the federal government already uses Waffle House as its disaster bellwether; why not also use it as a guide for the nation’s return to normalcy? Fast Food Feast, 2020 (Bill Wilson Studio) Ehmer told Trump that, in his view, restaurants like Waffle House have a responsibility to “get the wheels of the economy turning a little bit” by jumping ahead of the game on reopening. The most important thing at this point, he said, is saving the jobs of his employees and other people who support the fast food industry.

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