Spencer Horton
palmettoreport@gmail.com

(Fort Lawn, S.C.) – Rage rooms, businesses where you can go to release your anger by breaking stuff, are all the rage in the Carolinas

There are at least three rage rooms in the Charlotte Metro area, where customers can use a baseball bat to break things that the business provides, such as glass bottles, old computers and cars.

One of those new business is the Blank’D Rage Room in Fort Lawn, S.C., which opened earlier this year.

“I started wondering if we had any around here in this area, so come to realize that we don’t have one within an hour of Rock Hill, which is where I live at,” Bobby Trader, owner of the Blank’d Rage Room, said.

“So, I tried to hit the middle of Lancaster, York and Chester County and ended up opening out here in Fort Lawn.”

According to Vice, the first rage room opened in Japan in 2008, but they have been popping up across the U.S. and Europe over the last five or 10 years.

“It’s just been people that have been frustrated man, dealing with life, you know,” said Van Troy, owner of the House of Purge in Charlotte.

“Women getting left at the alter, guys getting left at the alter, cheating, bad days at work, people dying, you know; just everyday life that people go through and they come here to vent,” said Troy “There’s been plenty of people here that’s just been raging out, you know, secretly in their own safe environment.”

The price to rent a rage room can range from $25-$125 for a 15 to 30-minute session. Some establishments will even allow you to bring your own stuff, such as old TVs and appliances, to break and get rid of.

Though the owners see the business as a good way to release stress, there have been conflicting reports as to whether or not rage rooms actually help with anger management.

A 2017 study showed that they might actually make participants angrier, while a 2019 study showed that in conjunction with therapy, rage rooms can be beneficial.

“Some of the studies that have looked at this have actually found that when people do these types of things or whatever, it can actually increase aggression overall,” Giancarlo Anselmo, an assistant professor of psychology at Winthrop University, said.

“So, while it might be fun to go in and break some glass and stuff like that, as far as lessening the amount of aggression, there is not a lot of great research on it.”

There is a third Charlotte-area rage room, the Tonic Rage Room, located in Concord, N.C. There are also rage rooms located in Greenville and Columbia in South Carolina.