[danesparza]

What a missed opportunity on the part of Waffle House. How disappointing (and dumb)!

I would have hoped that if they had the sense to send out a cease and desist (because somebody obviously knew that "the waffle house index" was in the cultural zeitgeist -- heck, it even has its own Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle_House_Index ) ...

that they would have the good sense to work with somebody on a web page WHICH COSTS THEM NOTHING, and yet can foster a sense of good will for their company??

Well, I guess Waffle House doesn't deserve them.

Good riddance. And I'll definitely be going to IHOP when making my next Hurricane escape.

[alexpetralia]

The issue is moreso that they exclusively control their brand, and by letting someone else - who doesn't work for them and need not listen to them - control part of that, they are indirectly loosening control of their brand and narrative. They probably do not want the additional headache of buying this product, onboarding it, managing it, etc. The easiest but unfortunate solution here, to limit risk and liability, is to shut it down.

[danesparza]

If this is the case, then they are truly beholden to their own lawyers (and not the other way around, which is just ridiculous).

Why aren't they insisting that FEMA not use their brand when talking about "the waffle house index"?

[BryantD]

IHOP is good too!

If I were Waffle House, I would be thinking "hm. This is a one person project; what are the odds that it will break/go down eventually, and people will assume it was ours and get angry at us? Could write a clause about rights returning to us, get the code in escrow... but then we might wind up maintaining some random project using a stack that isn't part of our core competencies..."

And then I'd try to work something out anyhow, cause this is a cool project. But I sadly get the caution.

[bee_rider]

It is a cool project but probably imagine they wouldn’t want the escrow idea either, right? I mean they are a restaurant chain, they don’t want to go anywhere near anything that looks at all like providing emergency notification services, right? Even as a joke…

And I mean, do they even want to lean into that reputation to hard? I’m sure they don’t want to have some managers get somebody hurt by not closing a restaurant out of a misplaced sense of pride or bravado based on the reputation (I mean, I know almost nobody would do that, but somebody might!)