Waffle House Index

The map shows every Waffle House in the country with one dot per store. They're colored by whatever the chain's public locator (from Waffle House's API) says at the indicated hour. The JSON records hold the values for the thing FEMA folks half-joke about: the Waffle House Index (full menu, limited menu, closed), created by Craig Fugate. I pull all 25 states every hour and keep the history. The index number itself is not here yet (I explain why, below); this is the raw material.

Closures peaked at 64 when this record starts, sagged to 28 by Monday, and have not moved since 2026-10-12 19:00 UTC.

How this runs

An hourly job hits the locator once per state (25 requests, run in sequence, because I try to be kind to endpoints I don't control). The process then writes a gzipped GeoJSON snapshot for that hour. A second job reduces the newest hour to latest.json and the whole history to series.json, which is used by this page. Your browser fetches them on every load with a cache buster. You're welcome.

Status values come from the locator's JSON: open, temporarily_closed, not_selected, plus a coming_soon flag. Those last two cover pre-launch builds in the 25xx number series (the stores that sit on a map for months before anyone flips a fry), which is why the closed share runs against 2,103 stores that could actually serve you instead of all 2,111.

What is not here yet

Most importantly, the index number is missing. My v0 plan wants to subtract a background closure rate measured outside a storm's footprint, but the experiments (and reality) produced zero closure events in the first 62 hours.

There is also no partial-operations tier, which the Fugate version of the index calls a limited menu. This is due to the locator JSON having no such state, so there's nothing to read. Of everything the locator hands back, only status moves with the natural negative events. serves_dine_in and has_delivery can churn with a data sync and have nothing to do with storms, and the menus do not drop items when a store closes, so the fields anyone would reach for first are completely worthless for this. Which leaves status, and nothing else.

The palette is a dark take on the brand yellow from the locator's own stylesheet — #fff200, hue-matched rather than used at full strength, because that yellow is, um, pretty ugh.

Not affiliated

This site is not affiliated with Waffle House, Inc., which the absence of a logo should already have told you. I do not work for them, they did not ask for this, and they do not endorse it. The name and the colors are theirs, the data comes from their own public locator, so what you see is whatever that locator published at the stamped hour.