We all have those days. You know, the ones where you want to take the nearest heavy object and hurl it at the nearest breakable one? Sadly, it’s not quite socially acceptable to send shards of plastic or glass flying around the room. And most of us don’t have a stockpile of things to smash to bits, nor the time or patience to deal with the cleanup afterwards. Enter a Texas entrepreneur to solve your anger problems, no psychiatrist required.
Donna Alexander is the founder of the aptly-named Anger Room, probably the only business in the world that begs you to break everything in inside it. Located in a Dallas strip mall, the Anger Room is just as you’d hope it would be: filled with old furniture and electronics collected from junkyards and public donations, arranged to look like an office, bedroom or kitchen. But everything here is expendable: go ahead, grab a chair and chuck it across the room. Throw a plant at the computer screen. Stomp on the telephone. Grab a baseball bat and show that glass lamp who’s boss.
(MORE: Hulk Smash! How Much Damage Would The Avengers do to New York?)
Customers are fully decked out in safety goggles and helmets to protect themselves, but such courtesy isn’t extended to the objects in the room. Anything inside the Anger Room is fair game to be smashed, to whatever heavy metal or angry rap soundtrack gets your blood pumping quickest. The graffiti on the wall reading “Beast Mode” should only serve to further inspire the your rage.
Alexander actually came up with the idea a more than a decade ago, but didn’t launch her first Anger Room until 2008, out of her garage. The idea as ABC News reports, hasn’t changed: at the time, friends would come over to take baseball bats to the old junk in the room. But when word caught on, the demand was too much to handle. “I had strangers showing up at my house,” Alexander said, “so I said, ‘I have to find a real legit place.’”
The clientele that head through the Anger Room’s door is split between men and women, most looking to relieve job stress, Alexander says. Though she admits some of the women come to take out relationship stress on Alexander’s mannequins. “Put pictures on them, write on them, and then they try to beat the crap out of them,” she told a Dallas TV station.
A therapy session comes with three options: “I Need a Break” will give you a paltry five minutes in the Anger Room for $25. But you could always bump that up to the “Lash Out” session, where you get 15 minutes for $45. And for those nursing some serious rage, 25 minutes of “Total Demolition” will run you $75.
If the Hulk-style stress relief isn’t enough, they’ll plop you in a massage chair post-smash session to work out the rest of the kinks. All that venting, after all, can be quite hard work.
We all have those days. You know, the ones where you want to take the nearest heavy object and hurl it at the nearest breakable one? Sadly, it’s not quite socially acceptable to send shards of plastic or glass flying around the room. And most of us don’t have a stockpile of things to smash to bits, nor the time or patience to deal with the cleanup afterwards. Enter a Texas entrepreneur to solve your anger problems, no psychiatrist required.
Donna Alexander is the founder of the aptly-named Anger Room, probably the only business in the world that begs you to break everything in inside it. Located in a Dallas strip mall, the Anger Room is just as you’d hope it would be: filled with old furniture and electronics collected from junkyards and public donations, arranged to look like an office, bedroom or kitchen. But everything here is expendable: go ahead, grab a chair and chuck it across the room. Throw a plant at the computer screen. Stomp on the telephone. Grab a baseball bat and show that glass lamp who’s boss.
(MORE: Hulk Smash! How Much Damage Would The Avengers do to New York?)
Customers are fully decked out in safety goggles and helmets to protect themselves, but such courtesy isn’t extended to the objects in the room. Anything inside the Anger Room is fair game to be smashed, to whatever heavy metal or angry rap soundtrack gets your blood pumping quickest. The graffiti on the wall reading “Beast Mode” should only serve to further inspire the your rage.
Alexander actually came up with the idea a more than a decade ago, but didn’t launch her first Anger Room until 2008, out of her garage. The idea as ABC News reports, hasn’t changed: at the time, friends would come over to take baseball bats to the old junk in the room. But when word caught on, the demand was too much to handle. “I had strangers showing up at my house,” Alexander said, “so I said, ‘I have to find a real legit place.’”
The clientele that head through the Anger Room’s door is split between men and women, most looking to relieve job stress, Alexander says. Though she admits some of the women come to take out relationship stress on Alexander’s mannequins. “Put pictures on them, write on them, and then they try to beat the crap out of them,” she told a Dallas TV station.
A therapy session comes with three options: “I Need a Break” will give you a paltry five minutes in the Anger Room for $25. But you could always bump that up to the “Lash Out” session, where you get 15 minutes for $45. And for those nursing some serious rage, 25 minutes of “Total Demolition” will run you $75.
If the Hulk-style stress relief isn’t enough, they’ll plop you in a massage chair post-smash session to work out the rest of the kinks. All that venting, after all, can be quite hard work.