Blood, sweat and syrup: Why are there so many fights at Waffle House?

It is a question that has puzzled philosophers, sociologists and night-shift grill masters for years, probably. What is it about Waffle House, the charming and iconic American diner chain, that invites so many fights on its premises?

For anyone unfamiliar with this obscure Americana lore, the mostly southern chain — with 1,900 locations in 25 states — has something of a reputation. A cursory internet search will provide a wealth of videos showing customers and employees throwing down in the brightly-lit dining room, usually after sundown.

The phenomenon has its own online subculture. Hundreds of memes play on the idea that Waffle House staff know how — and need little encouragement — to fight. “A fully staffed Waffle House could take out ISIS,” reads one. “If this is your first fight at Waffle House, you have to fight,” reads another, accompanied by a photograph of Brad Pitt’s character in Fight Club wearing a hat belonging to the chain. In the last few months, both Saturday Night Live andThe Daily Show have run skits on Waffle House violence. You can even buy an “I Stand With Waffle House Employees” T-shirt, a heartfelt show of solidarity with the servers who stand in the line of fire every evening.

But why Waffle House? What is it about this charming diner chain that makes people want to poke each other’s eyes out?

Halie Booth knows more than most about the perils of working there. She’s a former employee who was turned into a meme herself when she was involved in one of the most infamous Waffle House brawls ever caught on camera.

“I’ve probably cleaned blood off of every surface of a Waffle house,” she tells The Independent matter-of-factly when we meet in Austin, just a short drive from the site of her infamous battle. “But really, that was a pretty mild night. It wasn’t as bad as it can get at a Waffle House.”

On a night shift in September 2021, Halie found herself in an unfortunately familiar situation as she passed the halfway mark of her time on the clock. It was in the early hours, and a group of customers was refusing to move from a closed part of the restaurant. When she asked them to leave, things quickly descended into a brawl.

A video taken by a customer shows a battle raging, sugar pots being thrown, punches landing. It shows Booth emerging from the ground during a brief lull in combat and finding her feet. Then, from screen left, a white chair sails through the air directly towards Booth’s head. With the reflexes of a cat she suddenly, impossibly, catches it with one hand, and throws it down to the ground. She then taunts the assailant, making a “come at me” motion with her hands.

It was poetry in motion. That moment — that swift ninja-like movement — seemed to confirm everything people thought they knew about Waffle House workers.

“You don’t tug on Superman’s cape. You don’t spit into the wind. You don’t pull the mask off that old lone ranger. And you don’t mess around with the night waitress at the Waffle House,” wrote one tweeter in response to the clip.

The clip bounced around online for a year before it truly went viral. Then it changed her life completely.

The internet reacted with joy, praise and wonder at Booth’s fighting skills. Artists immortalised her signature move. She made several national media and podcast appearances and started collecting nicknames: she was called the Waffle House Avenger, Waffle House Wendy, and her favourite of the bunch, Waffle House Warrior. Her face now adorns t-shirts and mugs. No one was more surprised than Booth.

“I thought it was just over and done with. I was like, whatever cool. And then this happens and now people are like, ‘Oh, you’re a folk hero, you’re an avenger.’ And I’m like, I can’t walk in a straight line without tripping over my own feet.”

The video not only made an internet star out of Booth, but also renewed the debate about Waffle House violence. That nagging question came up again: Why Waffle House?

For Booth, who worked the night shift for most of the four years she was at Waffle House, there was a simple answer to the question. It comes down to a toxic combination of 24/7 opening hours and alcohol.

“People get impulsive at night. That’s when you party, that’s when you drink,” she says. “It’s so late, and there’s no security at these late-night places, and when people get intoxicated, or you know, in any form of [inebriation], they turn into toddlers and they need somebody to watch them and babysit them.”

Could the simplest answer be the right one? Is the issue just that Waffle House is open when the bars kick people out, and that brings a wave of alcohol-fuelled humans from all walks of life into a small, brightly-lit environment?

If that was the case, surely the same thing would be happening at other all-night diners.

Across town from the Waffle House where Booth became a meme, Stars Cafe has been serving the inebriated in Austin for more than 40 years. Every night, all through the night, it plays host to travelling musicians, students and bartenders getting off work. Jetara Robinson has worked the night shift on and off for years as a manager. When she saw the video of Booth catching the chair, she saw a kindred spirit.

“It was a badass move,” she says. “Not many people can just catch a chair in the air and throw it back to them.”

She says working the night shift at any all-night diner requires that kind of toughness: “When we’re looking for service for overnight, I kind of need somebody who has a little bit more of a roughness and who can really handle that type of situation because, to keep the business going, if that happens, that server needs to keep serving.”

Although Stars Diner doesn’t see the same kind of violence, she says abrasive customers are a feature of late-night diners.

“A lot of people go to these places to sober up before they actually hit the road and go home,” she says. “They’re impatient, they want their food, they are drunk. And then if it took more than an hour wait, that’s when you start getting people going crazy.”

A combination of alcohol, bright lights, impatient customers can add up to trouble — it all makes sense. There’s one problem with this Unifying Theory of Waffle House Violence, however: these outbreaks of violence are not just taking place in Waffle Houses and other all-night diners, they are happening in retail stores, in airports, fast food restaurants, and anywhere a customer meets an employee in public. Waffle House may feature prominently in these videos online, but there are also hundreds of other incidents at other businesses. It’s almost as if there is a pandemic of violence in customer service-orientated businesses, a silent war between customer and server.

The research on this kind of violence is thin, to say the least — but there are some clues. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, described retail work as “one of the highest risk jobs for workplace violence,” and singles out convenience stores, gas stations, and businesses that sell alcoholic beverages as particularly at risk.

A New York Times analysis of FBI crime figures found that between 2018 and 2020, assaults increased by 63 per cent in grocery stores and 75 per cent in convenience stores. It found further that around 4 per cent of assaults nationwide, more than 82,000, were taking place at shopping malls, convenience stores or similar outlets.

One study published in December 2021 that focused on fast food stores in California between 2017 and 2020 found “restaurants plagued with criminal activity, where workers are regularly assaulted, robbed, spit on, yelled at, sworn at and told to go back to ‘their country.’”

The “Fight for $15 and a Union” collected 911 call records involving fast-food locations in nine of the largest cities in California, with a focus on four well-known brands: McDonald’s, Jack in the Box, Carl’s Jr and Burger King. Across 643 locations, they identified “77,200 violent or threatening incidents that resulted in a call to 911 for police assistance between 2017 and 2020.” Many of these locations generated hundreds of calls within the four-year span – as many as seven per week.

During the pandemic, incidents of violence in retail settings became so common that the CDC conducted a study into its prevalence and impact. It found high incidents of customer violence towards staff due to arguments over masks and social distancing guidelines.

So, what’s really happening here? Is this customer-centred violence a uniquely American phenomenon? Is this the inevitable outcome of a customer-is-always-right culture combined with a heavily armed and divided society?

Michael Sierra-Arévalo, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, whose research touches on violence prevention, was kind enough to humour The Independent when we asked for his view.

He said that beyond the obvious reasons why an all-night diner would face trouble, its reputation may actually be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“Waffle House is very much a meme at this point,” he said. “There’s certainly the possibility that people understand Waffle House as a place where certain norms are suspended, where you can push the envelope a little bit. That’s an empirical question, we don’t know that for sure, but the fact that everyone understands that Waffle House is a place where things might happen suggests that people might behave as such.”

But there is perhaps a deeper reason why customer service workers in America are the subject of so much abuse — something that is unique to American culture.

“I can’t paint with too broad a brush, but it is certainly the case that the occupation of working as a server, or working as someone in customer service, generally a retail worker, there is a class element to this. These individuals are assumed to not have the same sort of mental acumen, the same sort of skill set as doctors, lawyers, etc,” Sierra-Arévalo says.

In the United States, with an economic system built on the false idea that anyone can make money if they work hard enough, this kind of class tension is magnified, he explains.

“By extension, there are probably some assumptions that are made about how much deference should be given to these individuals who work in the service industry.  Are they here because, in the parlance of American exceptionalism and bootstrapped-picking-yourself-up-ism, they were either too lazy or too dumb to do something else, and thus they are less deserving of my respect or my deference?”

In other words, the high level of inequality in the US and poor wages in the service industry all play a role in how those workers are treated. Coupled with a customer-is-always-right culture in the industry, this creates a tension between the customer and a server when things don’t go the customer’s way, for whatever reason.

Travel across the pond to Paris, where waiters are paid a living wage, and the relationship is much more balanced. French waiters do not expect to have to fight every time they don their bowties, as Booth does when she puts on a Waffle House hat.

As someone who has worked in similar customer service jobs, Booth has experienced this kind of treatment first-hand for years.

“I think it’s a problem for anybody that works in customer service,” she says. “People have that mentality that the customer’s always right.

“Customer service workers, or anybody in that field, are looked at as nothing more than the help. It feels demeaning. You’ll be trying to manage something and all of a sudden, you’ll hear ‘Hey can I get…’ No, ma’am. We’re not dogs. We’re people, we’re just here to try and to make a living. This is our nine-to-five, we’re not doing this because we’re having fun. We’re doing this because we got bills to pay.”

How would Sierra-Arévalo, who studies violence prevention and societal problems for a living, solve the problem of Waffle House violence, and abuse against servers and retail workers more generally?

“It’s not just sticking a big red sticker on the door that says don’t do that,” he says. “There is a much broader and deeper set of conditions, inequalities, economic systems, that recreate this very ossified class hierarchy where, at scale, certain occupations — servers, retail workers, flight attendants — are more likely than other occupations and other people to be perceived as less deserving of respect less deserving of deference. And the flipside of that is, more deserving of my physical violence.

“To fix that you would have to reform a society at scale economically, socially, and culturally – such that there wasn’t this hierarchy of occupations,” he adds.

Put simply, solving the problem of Waffle House violence would require dramatic restructuring of society and eradication of inequality. And so no one should expect the chairs to stop flying anytime soon.