Gee Decker’s WreckIt Rage Room provides fun, therapy, and destruction.
WORDS BY PATRICK STRAIT
Gee Decker is standing in a pile of broken glass and debris.
Smashed beer bottles, plates, and even scraps of wood from a destroyed dresser are scattered everywhere, making it look like Decker is the sole survivor of a natural disaster. And she couldn’t be happier.
This past month, Decker opened the WreckIt Rage Room in Savage, giving patrons the chance to live out their most destructive fantasies in the safest and most fun way possible.
“I was feeling extremely unfulfilled in what I was I was doing and wanted to find a different way of helping people,” says Decker, who quit her job as a software developer to pursue her new venture. “This is just a different form of therapy.”
After immigrating from Guyana at just four years old, Decker has lived in Minnesota nearly her entire life. And yet, she had never seen anything locally quite like the WreckIt Room.
“My daughter and I were on vacation in Colorado, and we went to a rage room,” she explains. “It was extremely therapeutic for her and a bunch of fun for me. After that, I like to say that the universe spoke, and I listened. I was driving by the location right off 42 one day, and thought, ‘That would make a great rage room spot.’ I just want to be a place where people can have fun and get rid of a little bit of anger.”
For a woman who has decided to specialize in smashing, Decker insists she herself is anything but a ball of anger.
“I don’t carry any rage with me. It’s not who I want to be,” she says. “I’m a very positive, energetic, fun-loving person. The thing about the room is that, yes, there is rage, but it’s all about having fun and moving past the rage.”
The room itself is a proverbial house of horrors (but the good kind). There’s a “smash gallery,” where you can select specialty items like cookie jars, mirrors, televisions, or furniture to destroy. Customers are also given a plethora of smashable items like plates, bowls, and bottles to wreck, along with baseball bats, hockey sticks, and sledgehammers to implement the destruction.
“I like to say that we give items their last chance 15 minutes of fame,” Decker says, laughing.
From Craigslist to community donations, Decker has been steadily building her gallery of carnage. Though some of the items are pretty standard—at least by rage room standards—Decker has also found some specialty items that have helped work out some specific anger.
“I had a brother and sister come in whose dad was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer,” she says. “They had a lot of stress and anxiety about it. She goes, ‘Do you have a shitter?’ and it just so happened that I had a toilet in back. It was so satisfying to hear her yell while she was smashing this toilet to pieces.”
From birthday parties to corporate outings, Decker says the room is ready and available to anyone and everyone who needs to release the beast.
“We’re told our whole lives not to break things and to be careful and be gentle. And this is the one time you don’t have to do any of those things.”