Smashing things may not seem at first blush to be a winning idea to wrap a business around. Since March, however, nearly 1,500 people have shown up to break housewares, electronics and furniture at the Wrecking Club, two reinforced rooms in the basement of a building in the garment district of Manhattan.
Many of this number are couples looking for something more piquant than the usual date-night fare, said Tom Daly, the Wrecking Club’s proprietor. But rage is not confined to matrimony and other romantic unions, as Mr. Daly has also found.
“That’s the cool thing about addressing an instinct,” he said on a recent steamy afternoon. “Everyone’s got it.”
The Wrecking Club is not the first rage-based enterprise. Last fall, politics drove the business at the Anger Room, which opened in Dallas in 2008. Clients showed up by the hundreds to batter human effigies of Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump. Three Trump mannequins and two Clintons were utterly destroyed, according to the owner, Donna Alexander, and had to be replaced.