Feel Like You Might Explode? Halifax’s Rage Room is the Perfect Solution
HALIFAX – So first, you couldn’t find your car keys. Then the office printer jammed, again. And as you try to fix it, the toner leaks. And this is all before lunch.
You are having a terrible, no good, very bad day. And you need a place to let it all out.
Enter Rage Room Halifax, which opened earlier this month.
“If you’re having a bad day and you feel like breaking stuff, it helps everybody,” said owner Terry LeBlanc with a laugh.
The idea behind the Rage Room is simple. Clients comes in and, well…smash stuff up. Want to take a baseball bat to a printer, Office Space style? You can do that. Want to throw some dishes at the wall? That’s cool too.
Customers can bring in their own stuff to smash, or choose from the pre-existing Rage Menu, featuring basic packages, to electronic add-ons like laptops and computer monitors. LeBlanc gets most of the smashables from some local thrift stores that he partners with.
“The thrift stores that we use are all charity run,” LeBlanc said. “We do get people who donate stuff as well. The apartment building I live in, it think I’ve found more than 12 printers alone just there.”
Cameras will run to record the smashing experience, so participants can relieve the memories later. There is even an option for four friends to come in together in the Super Smash Package. LeBlanc also has speakers set up, so customers can play their own music while taking out their aggression.
The Rage Room also takes safety seriously, so there are some waivers to fill out, and protective gear to wear. Getting the insurance also proved to be the biggest issue for LeBlanc as he was starting.
“The biggest problem we had in the beginning was finding an insurance company that would cover the participant. And that took a long time to actually find,” LeBlanc recalled. “I smashed one of my first items here (recently)…Our insurance and liability and all of that stuff kicked in, so now we can actually break things with no worries.”
That’s all there is to it. Come in and break something. LeBlanc says the business model is simple for a reason, and he’s banking on it.
“There is something satisfying about smashing a printer or smashing a whole bunch of stuff. There’s just something relieving about it,” LeBlanc explained. “I think some other folks feel the same way. So you get to actually do it in a controlled environment.”