SAN FRANCISCO — Three grown men against one printer wasn’t a fair fight. But Armando Islas and his friends didn’t care. The three gathered around a defunct HP printer, brandishing giant hammers and standing in the smashed-up remnants of dead electronics.
Islas and two classmates were celebrating the end of their law school exams at Bay Area Smash Room, a basement unit where customers pay $120 or more to break stuff for 30 minutes. Smashing the printer would feel good, they said, like revenge on the shoddy campus printers that plagued them through the past six semesters of graduate school.
That sort of rage against the machine has spawned an entire industry. Across the United States, customers can book sessions at a smash rooms and pay anything from dozens to hundreds of dollars to smash dishes, furniture and — most of all — printers.
Turns out, though, smashing printers is kind of dangerous.
The now-controversial ritual dates back at least 24 years to the cult Mike Judge movie “Office Space,” in which frustrated office workers take a printer to a field and smash it to pieces with baseball bats. Since 2016 or so, smash rooms have provided a space where regular people can live their “Office Space” fantasies, and all that smashing is good for the spirit, owners and customers say.
Why do Americans loathe printers so much they’re paying actual money to hit them with sledgehammers? So many reasons, say smashers. Printers jam and run out of ink and confuse the interns, not to mention more serious offenses like their irreplaceable components and short life cycles. (HP, the largest printer maker by shipments, declined to comment.)
Revenge is a common motivator for smash room customers, says Miguel Moises, who owns and operates Bay Area Smash Room in San Francisco’s financial district. And when visitors go out of their way to request particular items to smash, there’s a good chance they’ll ask for a printer, he says.
“Sometimes we host corporate parties and they just want computers and printers,” Moises said. “They go crazy. You don’t even recognize the items they broke after.”
But there’s trouble in this rage-fueled paradise. The metals, gases and batteries inside consumer electronics are bad for our bodies, environmental experts say. Now some local governments are prohibiting smash rooms from breaking electronics at all, leaving smash room owners hunting for new objects at which customers may direct their ire.
Peter Wolf, who owns Los Angeles-based smash room Rage Ground, had to stop offering printers entirely after his local government stopped businesses like his from smashing them. Wolf pivoted and started giving customers more plates and furniture, but in the beginning it was tough to bring in customers without promising them technology to smash, he said.
“All these rage rooms are individual small businesses, so it’s really up to each one to find a solution that works for them in terms of getting inventory that’s not electronics for a price that people want to smash and how creative they get in solving that issue,” Wolf said. “Some will be able to adjust, and others will fail.”
When Wolf visited a rival room and saw it still offered electronics, he reported the company to the fire department, he said.
“As this is an active ongoing investigation, we cannot share any additional information related to the case at this time,” said Fariba Khaledan, supervising hazardous materials specialist at the Los Angeles County Fire Department.
The California Department of Toxic Substances Control’s website says that while rage rooms themselves aren’t illegal, smashing up “e-waste” including printers is. It will investigate any rage rooms that smash e-waste and offer a button for visitors to report new rage rooms in their area as an environmental concern.
What’s happening in Los Angeles could happen in other places, said Sarah Murray, who oversees Wisconsin’s statewide electronics recycling program at the Department of Natural Resources. The department has been visiting local rage rooms to get a sense of what’s getting smashed and whether there’s a risk to consumers, she said.
How we deal with aging or malfunctioning electronics affects not just our communities, but the whole globe, said Carlton Waterhouse, a law professor at Howard University and director of the law school’s Environmental and Climate Justice Center. Many of our gadgets emit dangerous chemicals when smashed up, and anything with a lithium iron battery is at risk of catching on fire or exploding. People who come in contact with improperly recycled electronics — including vulnerable people overseas who search through landfills for re-sellable parts — are at risk for adverse health effects, Waterhouse said.
Larry Franklin, co-owner of Lose It Rage Room in Woodbridge, Va., said his company always strips electronics of their motherboards, batteries and other hazardous parts before offering them to customers. He hasn’t heard any rumors of his local government regulating printer-smashing, but if it happened, he’s confident business would still be okay, he said.
“It doesn’t really matter as long as they have something to go at,” Franklin said. “They want to yell, scream and cry. That’s pretty much the gist of it.”
But the bigger problem, Waterhouse said, is that electronics companies purposely design products that break or fall out of fashion. Then those products pile up in landfills — or smash rooms.
We need a new model for reusing or refurbishing our end-of-life printers, Waterhouse said. And if that happens, we also might need a new target for our aggression.
